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