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.