We are a Green Gold Enviro school!!!!!

We are very proud to announce that this year we have achieved Green gold status as an Enviro school.

We have worked hard this year to look after our environment and to develop systems so that we can be sustainable. We have been working towards the Green Gold Status for a long time and this term the Enviro Schools team came to visit us and look at what we are doing.

We talked a lot about what it means to be sustainable and all the things we have been doing.

We brainstormed all the different things we do as a school to be an enviroschool and wrote them on 'leaves'. We then sorted them into different groups under these headings.

Empowered students

Sustainable communities

Learning for sustainability

Respect for the diversity of people and culture

Maori perspective

This created an image of a tree, this represents what we are doing and the goals we have for the future.

 

 

 

 

Here is our finished trees, the leaves represent what we have achieved so far and the nuts on the ground are our goals

The words on the left are the different parts of the description of what being a Green Gold Status school is.
We talked these through and checked that we had achieved these.

 When we had all agreed we had achieved Green Gold Status as a school we all signed the temporary certificate and...we celebrated!!!

As part of our presentation to the Enviro schools team each class created a presentation of the actions they had taken or work they had done towards being an enviro school. They did a great job, here are some examples.

Huge congratulations Hamilton East School on becoming a Green Gold Enviro School. 

Special thanks to Olive Jones and of course thanks to all our volunteers who have helped guide and support our learners.

Update: How is the kitchen garden growing?

Update: Hamilton East School has had a really busy year with an Operetta and a visit from ERO. However in between all the busyness we have been gradually working on our lovely kitchen garden area: planting, weeding, upgrading, building and much more.

Here are some photos of how the garden is looking. We are very proud of the development and send a big thank you to all the students, teachers and volunteers who have put in the hardwork.

We have new gates at each end of the garden...come on in...

 

The plants are growing well!

                      

Our fantastic new green house and some plants growing already.

 Trees and plants down the sides of the garden looking good.

 The tyre planters being well used.The start of the passion fruit vine!



 Our new seating so we can all enjoy this space.

What a fantastic looking space, we are very proud!

Composting

At Hamilton East School we use a composting system to make sure all our food scraps can be turned into compost and used to help grow more food. The enviro agents take it in turns to be on compost bin duty.  Their job is to collect the food scraps from the compost bin outside each classroom and bring it to our compost bins in the kitchen garden.

                 


They bring the scraps to these bins and put it in the correct bins. When the compost bin is full we put the label that says 'resting'. This means the compost is full and is becoming usable compost.

 

Here is one of our enviro agents being interviewed about her role as a compost monitor.

Jack's movie about our nature trail

Literacy about Planet Earth from Room 9

Raedence:
Wind, Clouds, Rain - Weather!

Raedence and H.j saw lightning outside their house along time ago.Weather can be every where.

Wind can move softly and wind can move strongly.Thin clouds sometimes can mean the weather might change.The dark grey clouds mean that the rain is ready to come out of the clouds .Rainbows are made when rain and sunshine combine.

My report tells about something new, important, unusual or interesting.	✔
My piece has a headline.	✔
My headline gets the readers attention and tells about the main idea of the newstory.	✔
The introduction comes next. It is short and tells who, when, what where.	✔
The rest of my writing tells more facts.	✔
I told about the news happening to someone else.- I have not used “I”	✔
I have not wasted words.	✔
I have underlined and corrected my spelling.	✔
All my sentences start with a capital letter and end with a full stop.	✔

Saving the nature trail

I used the toolkit because I am being literate.

Erana:

Wednesday  2nd  November

Me and my classroom went on a tour to the nature trail it was pretty slippery.Room 9 decided to fix the nature trail room 9 questioned and talked about what room 9 could do for the nature trail room 9 decided that there could be flowers and a anther path to go some where else.

James:

Natural disasters in NZ!

There are lots of disasters. Sometimes they can cost lots of money to fix and it is scary for towns/citys when they happen! There is earthquakes, tornados, floods, forest fires, volcanoes and lots more in NZ! Sometimes earthquakes can make floods because they might break the water pipes underground! Also, they could break a wall around a river and then it starts to flood! Did you know that Hamilton is quite safe from earthquakes? There have been 20 earthquakes in NZ (New Zealand) 2010 to 2016 (2010-2016). There has only been 1 in Waikato at Taupo! Christchurch has had 4 earthquakes (2010 to 2016). Only talking about ones with a biggter magnitude of 60. Also not talking about aftershocks. Did you know that tornados can spin up to 300 mph? Also, did you know that tornados often come from very very early in the morning to bedtime? They still come at other times. Tornados can also be named twisters or whirlwinds.

Newspaper Report Writing Rubric Level 1/2

	Friend	Myself
My report tells about something new, important, unusual or interesting.		✓
My piece has a headline.		✓
My headline gets the readers attention and tells about the main idea of the news story.		✓
The introduction comes next. It is short and tells who, when, what where.
The rest of my writing tells more facts.		✓
I told about the news happening to someone else.- I have not used “I”		✓
I have not wasted words.
I have underlined and corrected my spelling.		✓
All my sentences start with a capital letter and end with a full stop.		✓

Tawhiti:

Word work:

Cyclone a system of winds rotating inwards to an area of low barometric pressure, with an anticlockwise (northern hemisphere) or clockwise (southern hemisphere) circulation; a depression.

Severe (of something bad or undesirable) very great; intense.

Dew tiny drops of water that form on cool surfaces at night, when atmospheric vapour condenses.

Rain the condensed moisture of the atmosphere falling visibly in separate drops.

Satellite an artificial body placed in orbit round the earth or another planet in order to collect information or for communication.

Weather reporting in Te Reo

Enviro message from Aniket and Ahmed Room 9

Look how our gardens grow!!!

Our gardens are beginning to look very healthy. Look at the planters by Room 1!!!

Room 12's brainstorm about everything we do as an enviro school

Room 12's Genius hour enviro team

During Genius hour in Room 12 one group decided to become an enviro-team. They researched native plants that could go on the nature trail, interviewed an enviro-agent about composting and made planter signs so that other students will know what the plants are called.

All ready to present

A Kowhai seedling carefully dug, potted and then planted

The first planter label, for a Totara plant

Working on the nature trail

We are lucky to have families from our community who are willing to help us with our school grounds and to be an enviro-school. The grandmother of one of our students is a keen gardener and she came to help out with the development of the nature trail. She has helped us find some native seedlings from around the school and she brought some from her garden. 

Here she is with students from Rooms 12 and 13 explaining about the plants and showing the students where and how to transplant them. We hope that the nature trail will eventually have lots of beautiful native plants for us and the wildlife to enjoy.

The enviro-team explain what they are doing

At Positive Assembly this week the students from the enviro-team and Ms Jones explained what they are doing and reminded us that we all have a responsibility to look after and sustain our environment.

Here is what was said - written and presented by the enviro-team and Ms Jones.

"We are here to talk about our enviroschool. Our school has Silver status. The top level of Enviro schools is Green-Gold.   We are going to apply for Green-Gold status this year.

To be given Green-Gold status, we have to show that we are doing things to be sustainable and that we look after our environment.

A panel of judges are going to come to school in week 9. We will welcome them and show them around.   We will show them lots of things that make us proud of our school and  tell them what make us worthy of being a Green-Gold Enviro school.

What is Enviro all about?

·   It’s about a lot more than just picking up rubbish  - it’s about reducing rubbish in the first place (nude food, recycling, using environmentally friendly packaging and products)

·   It’s about being sustainable. This means doing things that don’t trash the planet or destroy the lives of other creatures.

·   Sustainable means not using things up. It means doing things that help nature keep being healthy so it can support us. It means leaving the world in a better place than we found it.

Some of the things we already do are:

·  Grow food in our Kitchen Gardens

·  :Care for our beautiful grounds with trees and plants that attract native birds

·  We have a composting system for our food scraps

·  We are growing fruit trees

·  We want to encourage bats to live in our school – we have a bat house in a totara tree (do you know where it is?)

·  We have rainwater tanks that collect rainwater off the roofs (do you know where they are?)

·  We now have a solar water heating panel on the roof of a very big building in our school (do you know which roof?)

·  We have a school bus which helps reduce the number of cars that bring children to school each day

·  We celebrate our school community – its cultures and foods and traditions.

· We have a nature trail and we are growing native trees to plant on it.

·   We take our lunch rubbish home and try to have nude food at school.

Our toolkit is all about sustainability:

·   We are engaged with our environment

·  We are curious about the world and the ways we can make it a better place

· We respect our environment

· We are connected with our environment  we know we are part of it, not separate from it.

· We can explain why it’s important to be sustainable and to care for our place because we are literate

We are as good as the world we live in and we are the children who will be the next adults to look after our planet.

We want everyone to think about how we can show the enviro judges that we are worthy of Green-Gold status.  You might have some things to add to our list of things we do.

We would like every class to have something to present to the judges when they come to visit. We hope you will talk about what that will be in your classes.