Getting stuck in!

Over the last few weeks we have been very busy in the garden.  This has included preparing the gardens for spring plantings. Children have worked hard to weed and dig over the gardens. We have also added some new soil to the green house for the new season.  It has been wonderful to see the number of children who see us in the garden and want to join in and help.  Lots of great learning about how to prepare the ground for planting, how to plant and take care of seeds and seedlings.  We know that is becoming increasingly important that we have skills to grow our own food in the future.  

We have planted:

• Potatoes
• Strawberries
• Cucumbers
• Capsicums
• Tomatoes
• Carrots
• Beans
• Peas
• Beetroot

We can't wait to see the fruits of our labour over the next few months.  Some lucky children have already sample some of the juicy strawberries that we have grown in the tunnel house! 

We also have some new swan plants growing in our Swan plant nursery in preparation for our butterfly gardens. We can't wait to plant them out when they are big enough!

Bird Feeders

Making bird feeders is a popular activity for children during EXPLORE time in Rakau.  We know that the birds love them too as they quickly come to feast upon them once they are hanging in the trees !  

Celebrating Cultural Diversity!

Over the last term the children have been busy exploring cultural diversity. We have realised that we have many connections to different countries and cultures from throughout the world. We have taken time to learn about a variety of countries and discover what it might be like to live in these and how it compares with life in New Zealand. 

We have now decided that we would like to have an artwork that represents all the different cultures that we have right here at Ashley School, and also those in the wider world.  We have designed totem poles that will represent the different continents of the world and  over the next few weeks we will be painting our designs onto the poles. We hope to have them displayed around the school in the near future! 

Helping Out

Members of the Green Team and Rakau helped Lesley Ottey to create a wonderful new learning resource for the community during our Outdoor Education Day.  The children learned how to sort waste correctly into the bins.Some of the children learned that lids are no good for recycling in these bins and that they can't put milk cartons in the recycling either!  These will be used as displays at  different community events so that they wider community learn what can and can't go into the different bins. Well done team!

Our Pellet Bus Gets A Make-Over

We  lucky this year to  have Gary, the school caretaker, who has amazing construction skills and has helped us reach our vision of giving the school playground  bus a make over . This has been such a hit with all the children! 

He has also been very clever and created a new sign at our second entrance to show our REACH values as visitors enter.  We now have our wonderful REACH pencils at one entrance and this fabulous sign at the other !  Thank you as our REACH values are such an important aspect of our school!

Citizen Scientists

We became citizen scientists. We had Toni from Enviro schools come into Kowhai to work with the Year 5 children and Enviro group members to conduct the great New Zealand garden bird survey. We looked at how to identify different birds and how to record tallies of the birds we saw. We then headed into the school grounds to watch birds and record the highest number of each species we saw or heard at one time. We found a wide range of birds including Magpies, blackbirds, sparrows, chaffinchs, plovers, seagulls, hawks and of course a couple of chickens! By adding our data to the New Zealand survey we help scientists to monitor distribution and detect population trends in garden birds. This information is important as birds are an important indicator of the health of New Zealand’s environment. You may like to take part in the garden bird survey at home next year Here is the website to find out more about what to do, when to do it and how to add your data. https://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/science/plants-animals-fungi/animals/birds/garden-bird-surveys

LEARNING ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY AND THE ANNUAL WASTE AUDIT.

This term the Enviro group "Green Team" worked with Toni from Enviro Schools to learn about sustainability and to complete a waste audit for our school.
Sustainability
Working with Toni we learned that we all have a role to play to make sure that we protect the environment for future generations by making sure that we think and act in ways that show respect for our precious environment. We are already making taking small steps at Ashley School by recycling, reducing waste , encouraging native gardens to be grown, having a school garden and encouraging people to be energy and water wise.

Waste Audit
For the waste audit we collected all the rubbish that was destined for landfill from one school day ( Monday) and sorted ( and weighed) this to see how we can reduce our waste even more. It was a messy job but worthwhile as we learnt some important things that we can share with other students at Ashley school to help us reduce landfill, save our school money and most importantly work towards a sustainable future for us all. We discovered that there is still lots of items making their way into our bins that could be diverted, in particular food which should be going into our tummies and scraps into either the compost/worm bins and paper that could go in our BOBs bins for recycling. We also found that we still have lots of single use plastic wrappers. Our next step is to remind each class of where food scraps and paper goes and to promote different ways to reduce packaging in our lunchboxes.

 

Enjoying the fruits of our labour!

A huge thank you to Sarah, Maggie's Mum, who came In to help a group of Year 5 and 6 children learn how to turn produce that we have grown in our school garden into delicious meals! They learnt how to make a delicious tomato sauce for pasta, pesto , stuffed capsicums and rhubarb and apple crumble! Excellent team work and manners were shown throughout the harvesting and cooking process. The Year 5/6 students ( and teachers) certainly enjoyed being the taste testers today! 

A huge thank you to Tamlyn, Amber’s Mum, who helped a group of children turn fresh produce into something delicious for all the children in Rakau to enjoy. They worked well with each other to turn apples from our school orchard and rhubarb from the garden into a scrumptious rhubarb and apple slice ! It is so wonderful to hear and see the enthusiasm of our children to cook and how well they work with each other in the kitchen as they grow their cooking skills. Well done everyone!

Rakau taking time out to appreciate our environment.

As part The Year 5-8 Education outside the Classroom we visited the Tuhaitara Coastal Park. We learned lots from Meredith, the park ranger, about the natural features including the biota nodes,Tutaepatu Lagoon, and the mudfish that are now beginning to live here. She shared with us some of the enviro projects that are now underway to enhance the natural habitats further. Some of us are interested in investigating how we could have our own enviro school biota node here now. 

We have worked to develop our observational skills  of our school environment. We used our visual skills to search our school to find natural and man made objects for our alphabet scavenger hunt .We also developed our listening skills by creating a sound map.  We found a space by ourselves to listen carefully to all the different natural and man made sounds in our school environment and recorded these in a sound map . We hope to compare these with the sounds that we hear on camp.

Being aware of our environment helps us to appreciate the wonderful things it has to offer !

Our butterfly gardens provide lots of learning opportunities.

The butterfly gardens outside Harakeke have been a hive of activity this term.  Children have had lots of opportunities to observe the life cycle of butterflies in action. We have discovered that caterpillars are certainly very hungry and we are lucky to have such wonderful parents who keep adding to our swan plants to keep them well fed! Thank you to the students in Harakeke who make sure the gardens are well watered.  

Korimako begin a Produce Box

Korimako Produce Box which will be located on the deck of Korimako. 

We would like to invite you to donate excess vegetables, fruit and herbs from your gardens to the box. Theo’s will be available for other families to buy for a gold coin donation. 

So bring in all those zucchini’s you can’t face eating again, the coriander that’s about to bolt, and the lemons you can’t use up. And don’t forget to check out the box for something tasty for your tea.

From Garden to Plate!

So much authentic learning to be done in the garden and the kitchen this summer! 

Children from the "Green Team" harvested the corn from our garden . They learned how to take the husks off the corn and that we could put this in our compost bin. They also learned how to prepare the corn by cleaning and snapping it into smaller pieces so there would be more to share. We cooked them in a big pot of boiling water and shared them with the students in Harakeke. Lots of teamwork and cooperation amongst this group of children! Well done and a huge thank you to Ashton's Mum, Carly for supporting us in the garden and kitchen to do this.

We  harvested some rhubarb from our garden and learned how to use this to cook some rhubarb muffins. Lots of teamwork and cooperation amongst this group of children! Well done and a huge thank you to Saoirse's Mum , Mia, for supporting us in the garden and kitchen to do this.

We harvested and cooked potatoes from our garden with the wonderful support of Emily, Kayla and Alyssa's Mum. Cooper discovered that it is not only people who enjoy eating potatoes as he found one that had already been eaten and the culprit was still inside! Washing the potatoes was a messy task. They learned knife skills to cut the potatoes into wedges . They learned patience as they waited for them to be cooked in the oven and that while they were cooking was a good time to clean up the kitchen. Sharing the wedges at lunchtime around the school was a favourite part for all the children. The tasted delicious and got great reviews. Well done team and a huge thank you to Emily for making this possible.

Isla, Joe and Matthew enjoyed the opportunity to learn how to turn the parsley and basil from our school garden into the most delicious pesto. It tasted amazing. Thank you to Kylie, Baxter's Mum for helping us with this.

We enjoyed learning how to make sweet and savoury scones. We read and followed instructions, measured and mixed , rolled and cut our dough to cook scones that were enjoyed by all the Year 5 and 6 children. We really loved the savoury scones that used tomato relish made from our tomatoes in the garden and basil. Thank you to Cooper's Mum, Casey for helping us with this.

Matthew enjoyed making yummy stir fry using vegetables from our garden too!

Community Seed Banks Initiative

We have had the opportunity to be involved with a new community project. We helped Lesley Ottey who is part of a group who is establishing a community seed swap project aimed at encouraging people to have a go at growing gardens . We learned how to harvest seeds and create paper envelopes for their storage . These will be used at the launch of the Rangiora Library Seed Banks, where community members will learn how to save and share seeds.

Building Relationships

Lesley Ottey from Eco Educate visited us early this term to talk to us about how important relationships and connections between people are for helping to protect our environment. We discussed the important role of volunteers in our communities and also how powerful children are to help share environmental messages and to rethink our thoughts about waste. We know that our decisions and actions can help make a difference for our environment.

Lesley has given us the challenge to share with our families the need to now separate our glass recycling into brown glass and clear/ green glass if we are taking it to the Waimakariri Recycling Stations. She even gave us some suggestions on how to set up systems to help us do this at home. Perhaps we could take on that responsibility in our own homes!