Regional Enviroschool Celebration Day

Enviroschool inspired artweek

Gardening and Compost Success!!!

Gardening

Hello, I'm Matt and I'm going to tell you what we have done over the past three weeks. It took us two weeks to weed the plant boxes outside Rooms 1, 2, 3 and 4 ready for planting next term.

Compost

As I type bananas fly through the air because the rest of the Envirocrew are sorting through our compost bin behind the library.


Yes, we are amidst of the compost fun. We had not been too sure how successfully the compost had been working as it has been filled with mainly fruit scraps over the past two years.

Composts work better when they have a mix of different types of plant matter but it seems our layering of newspaper soaked in lime has worked wickedly!!! Worms galore!!!


So after the guys took off the layer of rubbish (yes rubbish!!!) and fruit scraps not yet decomposed, they began shifting the rich compost into the wheelbarrow to transport to our gardens.


After a whole lot of smell they completed the job in style!!!

All about cuttings

Today we went around the school and got cuttings from some of the bushes and trees. Some of the cuttings were lavender, mint and there were others too.

Jenny taught us how to take the cuttings off the branches.

She said that when you take a cutting you have to make sure that you cut it the way it does not bend so that more roots will grow well once you plant it.

She also showed us how it is important not to have too many leaves on while the roots are growing.

Once we got the cuttings we put them into gardening pots or in water (for the herbs).

Beginnings....

In our first meeting of Term Three our Envirogroup watched a video about an Enviroschool that had taken action, looking at their environment. We also listened to how they saved power and water.

In our second meeting we went around and talked to the junior classes about what was and was not working with the things we do for the environment at the moment (recycling, composting, worm farm). We decided that there are some little things we can do at the moment but we first need to raise some money to replace the lost bins and buy compost cleaning products for each classrooms). Watch this space.

In our third meeting we decided that before we took any 'new' action we first we needed to talk to the rest of the school about how they feel about our school environment. We went around the different classrooms in pairs or threes.



- The first activity we had to do was called Mapping Our Place. We had to divide the kids into groups of five. Then we had to ask them what places were scary, interesting, relaxing, a place for learning, overused or underused. We recorded these on our Vision Maps for each class.




- The second activity was called Special Places. In this activity we asked the kids to get comfortable, to close their eyes and then we asked them to think of a place they liked in the school. They opened their eyes and described the place and why they liked it.




After we were done, we met back at our meeting area and made sure we had all of the ideas we had heard on the paper.

In the fourth meeting of the term we met up and discussed what we were going to put on one Vision Map to hold the information from the maps of all the Junior Classes. First we chose the icons to represent the different feelings (scary, fun, quiet, interest, overused). Then Annabelle jotted down our ideas with the icons.


At the end, Theresa showed us a website that is an energy saving Google. www.blackle.com

By Tao Roi