Lesley Inspires Us Again

Last week, Lesley Ottey worked with children around the school to help us increase our pool of knowledge on what to do with our food and paper waste at Ashley School so that we can improve our systems and make them sustainable for the future.  

In Korimako, the children learned more about how worm farms work and how to look after the worms at Ashley School.  They learned about what worms like to eat and what they don't.  They also created their very own mini worm farms to look after!

A team of keen enviro children from Korimako with the help of a parent are going to take the lead in making sure our worms are well looked after!  They will be making sure we put the right kinds of food scraps into the worm Bins.  

In Harakeke, the children enjoyed the challenge of creating paper bricks using paper from our BOB's bins and old newspaper with Lesley.  They learned how to turn this paper into something useful.... they are waiting patiently as they dry, ready to be used to help light the fire in winter!  We have a group of keen parents who are willing to help children make these more often!  

In Rakau Lesley shared with the Year 6 to 8 children how Bokashi bins can be used for food scraps.  We were keen to build up our knowledge to see if we think that this would be something that we would like to trial again at our school.   
We liked that we would be able to put all food waste in this system including meats and dairy products  and that it doesn't have a smell. 
In our class hui we had a vote and agreed that we thought it would be worth a trial in the senior school to begin with.  Carter and Caden have volunteered to set this up and monitor how it is going. We look forward to seeing some positive results! 

The Year Five children learned about how compost works.  We explored out existing compost bins and found that they are actually doing a pretty good job.  We even have some that is ready to go on our garden in spring when we are ready to plant.

We learned that making compost is a bit like making lasagne.We need to keep layering... a layer of  shredded newspaper/ cardboard , then a layer of Nitrogen rich materials ( grass clippings, weeds, coffee grounds, vegetables scraps, rotted manure, garden debris) and finally a layer of Carbon Rich Materials ( dry leaves, sawdust, corn stalks, pine needles, straw.)
We look forward to some more fantastic compost for our gardens to help them grow soon!  Sustainable Living!

Thank you Lesley for helping us build up our knowledge and understanding!  

A Native Garden

Now that it is Autumn, a good time for planting, the Green Team has worked together to bring about one of the ideas that Ella, a Year 7 student, had asked to be included in our EnviroVision Map early last year -  to create a native garden that used plants representing the classrooms around the school.    

We had been  looking after some lovely plants that we had donated from Trees For Canterbury  in our plant nursery until it was a good time for planting and we knew where we really wanted the garden to go.  

Initially we had thought that we would plant a garden along the back fence around the old school house but due to a new fence being put up and some issues with very wet ground we came up with a new plan.  In the end we decided  to create this garden in front of our school hall as we thought it would be a nice way to welcome visitors  and enter our school meeting place.  

We are now busy educating everyone about using the footpaths rather than short cuts through the gardens! This is part of our new Ashley School Care Code : 

We have fun and use our environment but look after it with respect- We walk around gardens rather than over  them.

We now have the important job of making sure we water and weed our new gardens so that our plants grow healthy and strong. We hope that our new native garden will help attract some more korimako (bellbirds) into our school environment!

The enviro team are now inspired and want to work on adding some further plantings and also tidying up some more gardens around the school.  

Well done Green Team, you are a wonderful group of children to work with!

  

Our Friendship Pole

During Term One, a small group of Rakau students decided that our Friendship Pole needed some attention as it was looking rather tired. They set to work to plan how they would do this and come up with ideas of what it might look like.  They really wanted it to reflect the concept of friendship and caring for others in our school. 
 



On Wednesday we were lucky enough to have Sarah (Clover and Trixie’s Mum),come and help them with the action phase. It was great to see lots of children involved during lunchtime with the painting of handprints on our pole. It includes tamariki from every class and most of the staff's handprints as well.

Words that support our REACH values were added to help remind us of the values we aspire to at Ashley School.

Great job Sarah, Lachlan, Ryia, Clover, Eden and Jorja-Rose who helped this wonderful project to happen at our school. It is certainly a bright and colourful addition to our environment and most importantly about bringing our school community together. Kapai!

Developing the Ashley School Care Code.

As part of being an Enviro School we are developing a Care Code for our School. This is a guide to how we will treat our environment and an important step in making our practices sustainable.

"The Green Team" worked with Toni from Enviro Schools on Thursday  to look at the process for developing the code.  We looked at  some examples from other Enviro Schools and how they have shared these with their school community

In small groups we then worked together to brainstorm our ideas for what we thought we needed in our Care Code for Ashley School. We tried to think about how we will treat plants and living creatures, how we will use our environment as a fun learning space, what we will do with our rubbish as well as how we will save energy, water and share environmental ideas with others.

Our next step is to share our ideas with the rest of the school to get their ideas too and to think about how we might display these so that everyone in our school community knows about them.  

We will share with you our draft ideas soon!