Nature trail update.

The Hamilton East School nature trail is having a facelift.
We have a fantastic group of parents who are organising working bees to create a sustainable track. The next working bee is this Thursday morning 7am-11am. If you are available with a spade, wheelbarrow or just a helping hand, please let us know. A group of Enviro students will also be working on the track at this time.

We also need punga to strengthen part of the track. You can help by 'sponsoring a punga'. Please check out the board and see Ms Jones at the gate for more information.








Here are some images of Tui Hub exploring the progress on the nature trail this week. They were practising note-taking in preparation for their historic walk.

Jack's movie about our nature trail

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.

Greenhouse

This is the Greenhouse that was gifted to the school by the WISE group.

It has been incorporated into the improved area between the Old Dental Clinic and the Hall.

We hope to grow early tomatoes this spring.

We have installed a watering system to irrigate the Greenhouse.

So with the goal of achieving Green-gold status as an enviro school, what is on the agenda this year?

Here is a list of areas we want to work on this year, there will be more to come so please keep reading and make suggestions if you have any!

Kitchen garden

Develop our kitchen garden and develop an area that can be used for whole classes to come down and sit in. At the moment it is hard for a whole class to come down to the gardens and know what to do. We would like classes to be able to come down and sketch as well as do some planting. We also want to get the gardens a bit more organised and have a lot of usable produce.
 

Fruit trees

Create an area to start planting a small orchard of fruit trees on Putikitiki.

Rubbish

We are not happy at the amount of rubbish around the school, we are thinking about ways to reduce rubbish and encourage students to bring in less pre packaged food, as this is often much less healthy.
 

Nature Trail

Can we get the nature trail ready to be used by students?

Composting

Continue and improve our composting system – work on educating students about what can be put in the compost and what cannot!