Kitchen Garden

Development of the Kitchen Garden. 

Hamilton East has a wonderful space behind the hall that we use as a kitchen garden. We grow produce, have some fruit trees and have a composting area. 

Parts of the garden are working well but we have a whole area that is not being used and is looking messy. We would like to create an area that students can sit in as well as do gardening in. Ms Jones has an exciting vision for this part of the kitchen garden: we can build a wall that students can sit on and sketch parts of the garden.

Looking down towards the entrance to the hall

Here are some photos of what the area looks like now 

The end of the garden by the old dental clinic

By the entrance to the hall

 This is Ms Jones' vision created on photoshop.

Students can sit on the seat and the wall creates a planting area above

Ms Jones applied for funding and we were able to build this fantastic wall!!

Here are some photos of the process of  building the wall.

Looking good!

Now whole classes can come down and enjoy the garden and learn about growing plants and sustainability.

For our inquiry we all made movies about Turangawaewae - Our place. This is the movie Room 2 made about needing to look after our drains and making sure rubbish doesn't go down them.

Turangawaewae movies

A group from Room 12 made a movie about their ideas and plans for the Nature Trail.

A visit from Enviroschools

Robyn Irving from Enviroschools came and talked to our Enviroschool committee  about what we need to be doing to gain Green Gold status. She described the journey as being like the Waikato River, all the ideas and actions are continually moving and progressing…we had to place different labels onto the river to show where we thought we were in our journey, here is a photo of our awa and our ideas about where we are in our journey.

This was a good exercise to get us thinking about the process of being an enviro school and where our goal and vision lies.

 The labels had words such as :

'committed to the journey

initial steps

empowered

courageous

exploring

laying foundations'

Words like 'initial steps' we placed at the beginning of our journey (our awa) but words such as 'exploring, empowered, and courageous' we felt should be found all the way through to different levels. We want to be feeling empowered and courageous in different amounts at different times.

On the enviro schools website it states 'The journey starts small, it ebbs and flows, sometimes quietly moving, sometimes racing along. (http://www.enviroschools.org.nz/how-enviroschools-works) . This is exactly how it feels to be working as an enviro school and the pace of progress depends on many factors; environmental - such as the season and the weather; professional - such as what is happening in classes, assessment and report writing time or a school show.

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!

 

Welcome to the 2016 

Enviroblog!

Hamilton East School currently holds a Silver enviroschools status.

This year our goal is to achieve Green Gold status. We have a beautiful school with incredible school grounds that we want to make the most of and use to make sure that all our learners understand how to live sustainably and healthily and with the environment in mind.

We have a lot of plans and ideas for our school and are excited to see what will happen this year!!!

Potted chives - Room 1

Potted Chives

We had little seeds,

And put them in a pot.

We put them in the sunshine,

And watered them a lot.

We waited and we waited.

Watched them grow and grow.

And then one day little shoots

Came out to say hello.

See the original blog post here.