Empowered Students

Sharing with Roslyn School - Mandy Veza around our enviro journey

Tuesday 15 May 2018

Flynn, Eli, Allie, Aidan F, Mia

we inspired her to drive her students to have voice/choice in their enviro journey. 

She came away buzzing! 

Team working on our 2018 Working Bee: 

Allie, Jirapinya, Tayla and Campbell are liaising with Nga Kaakano Puawai team and Mr

Robinson to deliver our best yet Working Bee - major project to be confirmed soon.

Junior Enviro Gang - run my Mrs Long 

Mrs Long is running a junior (Kowhai) enviro team our liaisons are Flynn, Tayla,

Tara J, Omar ...watch this space.

Lizard Garden

Its a safe highway for the lizards to travel from the garden to the bush. Thank you to the Zoo people for helping us to succeed in this procedure.

Construction gang working on guttering for our panels for the bottle green house.

This is our new site for our bottle green house as at 16 March 2017

We are building an igloo out of milk bottles and still persevering with our bottle green house!!

Students Taking Action T4 2016 - each student from Y5-8 took on individual actions, while the Y0-4 did class actions.  All participated in our Working be 26 November. Yay!

Monday 1st December:

Check out these awesome children who met me at school on Sunday to take action!

Their plan was to move the bottom field garden up, and with the help of some awesome parents we got it done :) Thanks to Mr Marsh for getting us started!

There is some more wood in Mr Marsh's shed if any other children or parents would like to add to it. 

Make sure you check out the garden to see what we add to it this week.

Miss Matich

Nikau cleans up Maungaraki for Keep New Zealand Beautiful Week - 19/09/14

Update on class rooms project
Rm 1Compost is going quit well we have a roster to follow on who is doing it each week.
Rm 2 on camp
Rm 3on camp
Rm 4
Rm 5 Garden going well.Vegetables ready for market.

Rm 6 Worm farm is going well we have 22 liters of worm we and checking on Tuesday and Friday. Worm's are growing fast.
Rm 7working with R11 they do regular rubbish pick-ups
Rm 8 can tabs - 13,000 have been collected we will be giving them to Terry (coming from Auckland Kidney kids) and he will pick them up - the last Friday before the end of the year.
Rm 9 Cans $$ went to Te Omunga Hospice $11.70 + a $5 donation.  This term we are collecting for World Vision, please bring all your empty cans to our room.
Rm 10 Bank plant's are taking off and are growing well. We are continuing to keep kids off the bank as well as the rubbish.
Rm 11 Picking up rubbish round the playground. Playground looking sparkly clean.

P.A.L. (Physical Activity Leaders)

Our Year 7 and 8 PALʼs have completed their training and are now running lunchtime games once a week with the younger students.

The photos are in our school newsletter 26 July

 

 groups in action recently.

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Minute of Enviro

AB Adam, Casey and Jhanvi are doing their movie

18 Mahuru

Lunchbox Challenge – Bayley the leader – half have paid money – still require more$ for class prize.

Start the challenge on Thursday 20 September.  Checkers are:

R1 Deepak

R2 Adam 

R3 Casey

R4 Amelia

R5 Kaitlyn

R6 Miah

R7 Jhanvi

R8 Grace and Al

R9 Grace

R10 Molly

R11 Bailey and Sophie

Sophie has the scoring sheets start Thursday of this week. Sophie explained how to use the sheet and record tally chart.

Landfill rubbish is recorded on the sheet then divided by the number of class mates – to give us the average.

Blog update:  Sophie is going well, still have lots to do in terms posting the old posts under the banners.

Up dated photos of projects – thanks to Deepak, Miah and Grace for their photos.

Congrat’s to R3 who are the first room to have an enviro page on their blog.

Sophie showed us all how to create a e-page on our class blogs!

Meeting ended 11.45

 We are currently making up graphs to show progress we have made with our recycling the blue bin below now gets emptied more than the orange landfill one above. Yay!

 R1 are continuing to empty our school food scraps - look how much we get!

 Some of the more premium food goes into our worm farm - we have started producing lots of worm wee...yay R6

 Miah and Grace are the R6 E-team leaders. ;)

As you all know we are going to build a shaded seating area and sandpit.

so far we have met Jess,Veeral and Mitch.

Last week Mitch worked with our design team and gave them instructions on how to draw our design from the top view.

Jess worked with our project managers to make a time line of our actions.

Veeral is coming in one weeks time but last time he came he showed us two tools,a shearvain and a tool that we cant quite remember, we are going to ask Veeral next time he comes in.

 We ran around and checked on all the class projects - here is R5 checking out the garden.

Our latest venture is to challenge the whole school to reduce plastic wrappers/gladwrap etc in their lunchboxes - check out Bailey's poster.

 Kristan Robinson the volunteer coordinator from HCC along one of the 3 other volunteer workers

These boys found this book published in 1820s - we couldn't believe it!!

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We all are to go into classroom to check on paper bins, particularly the GOOS paper bin (good on one side) for kids to use the other side instead of throwing it out.  If no box the team/class will make one.

VSA bracelets have arrived $3– handed over to Jhanvi.  She will gather a team together to start selling on the 6 August 2012.

Lunchbox challenge – Bailey suggested a challenge to not bring gladwrap/zip lock /pastic bags in our lunch boxes – AIM to be plastic free.  We are keen to run with this. Suggested prize for the overall class prize for the best class done randomly spot checking. Sophie going to work with Bailey to get stuff organized -Date for checking, checklist and posters for advertising, etc.

Recycle Your Cans, Support Room 9’s Fundraiser

This year Room 9 is raising money for charity. All the money
our class has raised last term is going to the S.P.C.A.
We raised $19.20. This term we are raising money for Plunket.
To raise the money we are collecting cans and sorting them into magnetic and non-magnetic. Please give Room 9 all
your clean metal cans and we will sort them for you. Thanks, Giancarlo and Alyssa.

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Class projects:

R11 – Casey –clean up and picking rubbish going fine do it once per week – wet weather has inhibited them to date, but they will get back onto it. Are happy to work with R7 on a buddy basis.

R10 – Sophie/Kaitlyn/Molly – bank project partially will now be finished by HCC due to steepness of bank. 

R9 – Grace Mc – collection of cans – we got $12.30 for plunket and $9.30 SPCA.  T3 collecting this term for the Hospice.

R8 – Al over 8000 can tabs trying to get 7000 but have exceeded it – now check with class re goal.  Terry coming down from Auckland to collect for the kidney kids.

R7 – Jhanvi – (new class this term) clean up round the school along with R11.  Have a new poster to display around the school

R6 – Miah + Grace – worm farm –Miah visits every Tues to check how they are going.  Went today and found out that the plug was blocked and they are pulling it apart to clean it out today.

Mā tini, mā mano, ka rapa te whai. By many, by thousands, the work will be accomplished (many hands make light work).
Nga mihi nui kia koutou
If anyone doubted the support Maungaraki School gets from it’s community, this was well and truly dispelled during the weekend’s working bee! The weather was perfect and we had an amazing turn out of friends, family and community members. The whakataukī (proverb) above was proven to be very true as almost everything on our “to do” list for the day was ticked off! Huge thanks goes to:
~ The children from the Enviroteam, who did an amazing job of organising and managing the day, with plenty of jobs to keep people busy;
~ The Maungaraki Baptist Church, who pitched in and not only helped with the hard labour, but also put on an amazing lunch to feed all the hungry workers;
~ The Home and School group, who not only turned out in force to help out, but also funded resources for the pergola, the laying of the mosaic tiles, compost and bark for the gardens;
~ The staff, students, parents, friends and family, who gave up time on their weekend to come along and help out (estimates say over 100 people were here over the course of the day).
For me it was a real treat to see our Enviroteam taking the initiative, organising the event and then getting stuck in themselves and working hard. I enjoyed working alongside a number of families that I haven’t previously been able to chat to, and absolutely loved walking around the school, seeing the results at the end of the day.
On Tuesday night we also had our Whanau Hui. 6 families were able to come and share their ideas with us regarding other things we can do to maintain, or even raise the already high standard of educational achievement we have for Māori students at Maungaraki School. As New Zealandʼs indigenous culture, Māori is a part of not only our curriculum, but also our heritage as New Zealanders. Those who are interested in learning more about Te Ao Māori (things Māori) can check out this website: www.korero.Māori.nz The resources page has some neat ʻfreebiesʼ that you can order ahead of Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week).
Naku noa,
Lisa Cavanagh, Principal.

R5- Kaitlyn and Sophie – can’t get down to the gardens due to the wet weather – but they intend to when it isn’t quite so muddy.

R4 – Adam – companion planting going well and they intend to sell the product at our gala in T4.

R2+3 – Thomasgardening the gardens in front of the classrooms and its going well.  Dead flax going down to the memorial as weed mat.

R1 – Deepak – composting going well – we regularly tell classrooms if they aren’t putting the right stuff in the bins. 

 Room 10 met with Kristan Robinson from the Hutt City Council - she brought in some samples of the trees we will be planting on the bank early T3.

Room 10, 8, 6 and 5 are participating in the Great Postcard Project.  These postcards have come in from schools all around the Wellington region. 

We have found this to be a great reflection from the Working Bee day. 

"Maungaraki School - we want to make our school look cooler.  We have just had a working bee on Sunday 10th June, our enviro team wanted a new sandpit to look out over our view of the harbour.  We also put some mosaics in around the flag pole.  Also we have a really cool garden that has paths in there that have compost, wood chips and bark chips around the plants.  We also dug up some old concrete and we are now onto growing grass in its place."  By Sophie

"Working Bee - our school had a working bee to fix the school.  One of the jobs is to put a roof over our sandpit.  Another job was fixing the mosaics.  We also did the gardening, we used the compost to do that." From Samuel R10

"On Sunday 10th June we did an awesome working bee.  We did it to make our school look more stunning.  At the working bee we had 5 different jobs: gardening, sandpit concrete in tyres, build stone wall, mosaics, digger to dig up concrete.  My job was to make sausages so that people won't get hungry.  My mum was weed-eating the whole school!" By Kaitlyn

"On Sunday 10th June our school had a working bee. We did it to make our school look nicer and more environmental.  It got very busy at our school and there was even a sausage sizzle.  Some of the things we did was: took out concrete, took soil to make grass.  Our school now looks cool!" By Elise

Some wrote about their class projects:

"Hey, I'm a member of Room 10.  As an awesome enviro class we are doing an enviro project.  We are beautifying a weed filled, gorsey bank.  When we have finished it will have delicious healthy fruit trees as an example: plums, apples, pears, etc.  And it will also have many native plants.  I hope your school is as cool as ours?!" By Joy

This is the collection from our school.

On Friday, Room 5 went down to their garden and picked some lettuce. Then they went to the staff room and washed it and finally made lettuce smoothies.  They drunk it and they said it was "yummy"!!

What a great way to use up leftover lettuce :)

By Kaitlyn and Sophie G

Lettuce Superfood Smoothie

This is a great smoothie to make if you would like to get rid of extra lettuce. It’s also super healthy J

Ingredients:

-       Bunch of Lettuce

-       1 Cup of fruit of your choice

-       3 Bananas

-       Extra Orange juice if you would like to make it more liquidy

Method:

Wash and dry lettuce

Add to blender

Cut up fruit

Add to blender

Cut up banana

Add to blender

Blend well

Eat!

  

The Sharp familiy donated Silverbeet, lettuce and brocolli plants that Room 5 have planted down in the bottom field garden.

Our lettuces are growing nicely.

We have to go down to the garden quite often and pick up all the needles that fall from the trees.

We planted carrots.

We water our garden all the time.

It's a great 10 minute classroom break.

We make our way down to the garden everyweek. We head down with our class but also other members of Kowhai syndicate are welcome to come if they choose to garden for golden time every Friday.

We had swan plants in our classroom during term 1. We moved them down to our garden for term 2. Hopefully, later in the year we will get some more caterpillars and butterflies.

Room 5 LOVE looking after our garden and caring for the environment!!!

Today in enviro team we were sitting down and making a group sheet that parents can came and put there name on a job that they would like to do they can do this when there child has there 3 way confrence and we also worked on who's doing what on are enviro working bee day
Sophie  

Hey look what our enviro team has put up each class room in the school has a project that they have to run for the year.

At this stage in our journey we have established, as a small enviro team, that we need the whole school on board in some way to continue striving for our aims. These are

1. to continue to beautify our surroundings - Wahi

2. to further develop Maungaraki kids as confident leaders - Tangata

3. to continue to reduce, reuse and recycle all materials - Tikanga

4. to develop stronger links and take action within the community and wider environment - Kaupapa Ako

We feel we are currently doing this by:
Place - Wahi
Physical surroundingsWhere the school buildings and grounds are designed to work with natural systems, and reflect the culture and heritage of the place. The school becomes a site for hands-on student action and learning, which integrates the academic, creative and practical aspects of learning. Room 4, 5, 10 and the enviro team are working on sustainable gardens, companion planting and our seated, shaded sandpit area will be soon finished with the help of a community working bee on Sunday 10 June 2012.

People & Participation - Tangata
Organisational management
Decisions and actions are made with the involvement of students staff and other members of the community. There is a sense of belonging and ownership and schools draw on the combined wisdom of their multi-cultural community. Rooms 1 and 2 are working exclusively on student voice and leadership within our school. Our Enviro-team are all leaders attached to classrooms in the school, to voice all student's choices, decisions and assist with putting into action projects on a school-wide basis. Examples of this are the worm-farm, composting areas and gardening.

Practices – Tikanga
Operational practices
School policies and systems support environmentally friendly and sustainable practices, which are monitored and evaluated, to document progress being made towards sustainability. Room 1 is in charge of all composting, collecting food scraps for worm farm and our compost bins. They also assist with paper and card collection for our blue recycle bin. They also monitor the staffroom recycling. Room 8 and 9 are collecting old cans and can-tabs for money to go towards non-profit organisations (such as kidney kids, SPCA, Red Cross). Room 11 are collecting litter from around the grounds and recording it. All classrooms have a plastic bin (Paper4Trees) of which they collect paper, we have collected 17 trees for our collection of paper so far.

Programmes - Kaupapa Ako
Living Curriculum
Students take action on real issues in the school and wider environment, and they learn as they create a sustainable school and community. Students share their learning and become mentors and leaders for younger students, and for other schools and groups in the community. The enviro team currently act as a mentors/leaders for our junior school class projects. They identified that there wasn't enough shade and seating for students, so designed and began to build the seated/shaded sand pit. We are following this up with another working bee Sunday 10 June 2012 for completion. They also wrote and partitioned for the Enviro House as the bottom of Dowse Drive (2010). Following on from the Take Action for Water unit (2010-11) we had installed a rain water collection tank for the purposes of watering our gardens. Following the Pike River disaster a memorial was set up with 29 trees as a representative. Some classes also went out a collected litter specially around streams. As a whole school we annually help the HCC with the Keep NZ Green and collect litter in and around Maungaraki community.

In the Pursuit of Excellence, (our school moto) we feel this is enough grounds to warrant our pursuit for SILVER 2012!

In enviro today we printed photo's of each class's project like doing the garden or picking up rubbish round the school. What we are doing with those photo's? We are printing the photos and linking string to the classroom. After this we looked at the silver criteria and are in the process of checking to see if we are on track. - From Sophie

 Room 5 are working on the food gardens

 Mrs de Villiers is working on the tyres.

This year each class has a project to do round the school.

room 1 compost is going well worms have lot's of food  to eat.

room 2 ? TBC

room 3 ? TBC

room 4 is getting companion planting.

room 5 is doing the garden down at the bottom field

room 6 The worm farm is going ok but some things that is going in the bins are wrong like orange bels that will kill the worms also if you have any milk bottles bring them to room 6.

room 8 can tabs they have 3978

room 9 is collecting  cans

room 10 is doing the garden behind the playground pulling out all the weeds and getting some fruit and other trees along with the Council.

room 11 is picking up rubbish round the school

 Room 1 are in charge of the whole school compost system.

 So far its going well, Mr Marsh hasn't complained yet.

The year has kicked off with another change to our team. Our lead members are:

R11 – Casey representative

R4 – Adam representative

R5 – Kaitlyn/Sophie representative

R6 – Miah/Grace representative

R8 – Alistair, Amilia and Grace K

R9 – Grace M

R10 – Sophie, Kaitlyn Molly

R1 – Deepak and Miah

R2 – Thomas, Adam and Hannah

R3 – Jahvai, Bailey, Casey

Some of our older children are representatives for junior classes, another great leadership role for them.

Each class will have their own project to follow through this year - we are so looking forward to seeing the outcomes of these in Term 4 when we come to our market day.

Last week we were inside the library talking about how we do the compost bins. We figured out a roster - Sophie is typing this up. Mr Marsh showed us how to do the compost. After a while, we went out of the library and Mr Marsh showed us how to get out the worm pee (otherwise known as the secret formula - don't tell anyone.

This year we have recruited lots more people to help us in the Enviroteam.

Our goals for this year are...

To design and build a shaded seating area with the help of some engineers.
To get out water tank ready to use.
To make sure we update our blog regularly.
To fix up our garden using some donated tyres, there are millions of them!
Hopefully this year we will get badges for enviroteam members.
This year we want to go out with a bang BEFORE the year ends.So we want the silver award this year.

We have split our team into two main groups. The blogging team, and the gardening team.

By Adam, Jessica and Joshua.

Last night, Mrs Sutherland was awarded the prestigious "Meridian School Environmental Leadership Award." This is what they said about her:

"Jackie has set up an Enviroteam of students; established a worm farm and vegetable garden, and revamped the composting system to make the school more sustainable. She is inspiring students to advocate on environmental issues and take the lead on some school environmental initiatives."
If you would like to read more, go to: http://www.gw.govt.nz/encore-for-our-environmental-restoration-and-conservation-champions/

Woohoo! We're so proud of you!

Maungaraki School has been asking students, parents, teachers and friends to collect barcodes from McCain vege packets. We have got 915 points! So today we went on a shopping spree in our meeting. 

We really need a wheel barrow so we will spend 625 points on that.

We decided to get some sheep poo pellets so our plants in our garden will grow faster.

The Enviro Team decided to get something else as well as the sheep poo pellets we decided to get a potato Hessain Bag you can grow your potatoes in it .The potato Bag is 75 points.

Thank you to everybody who helped out by bringing barcodes!

by Jhansi and Jackson.

For the third year in row we have...kept Maungaraki Beautiful!

On the 23rd of September, Maungaraki School Explored The community of Maungaraki to find rubbish that had been left in certain places. The years 1 and 2s explored the school, the year 3 and 4s cleaned up around the shops and the years 5, 6, 7 and 8 cleaned up Percy's Reserve for two hours. The reason we were cleaning up the community was because The Enviroteam had earned the Bronze Award. For the Years 5 to 8 first we walked down to Percy's Reverse,then we were separated into groups and looked for rubbish, our group went by the motorway first. Thirdly we met back at the same place we started and played a game of stuck in the mud,Finally we walked slowly back up the hill. When we got back we were tired.

By Thomas

Today the enviroteam had a party! We were celebrating because on Tuesday afternoon we became a bronze enviroschool. Mrs Sutherland even baked us a cake.

Molly, Deepak, Jhansi, Jackson, Josh, Jack, Adam, Tanya, Miss Evans, Mrs Sutherland and Mrs Jennings all met with Jean from the Hutt City Council. As a group we had to decide if our school had met all of the requirements to become a bronze enviroschool. It was a very long, hot afternoon, but fortunately by the end of it we decided that all of our hard work and the changes that we have made were enough to get the award.

Now we need to decide how we're going to celebrate with the whole school...

Achievements so far

Our team have been reflecting on what we have done so far - which is quite a lot! Click on the images if you would like to have a read!

We made a scrapbook page to celebrate everything we have done so far. It will be published in the Enviroschools scrapbook later on this year!

Our hearts thudded with excitement. It was the 1st of June. The Enviro-Team had to go to the Hutt City Council Chambers. As each person started to arrive, the others waited patiently outside the building. Children were getting restless, and adults were chatting as usual. After we got in, we waited for ten minutes. It sounded like monkeys were having a wrestling match.

The reason we were there was because of a house in Percy’s Reserve, right next to the Dowse to Petone was currently not being used. Some staff of the Council wanted to use it as an Enviro House. The house would educate the public on how to be environmentally friendly in their own home.

As soon as the meeting began, the chairman made each of us introduce ourselves. Not long afterward, we read our speeches, encouraging the council to give us the Enviro House. All were really good speeches. We were very positive that we will get the Enviro House. After our speeches, other members of the council and the public shared their presentations.

After them, the chairman asked everyone if they approved of the Enviro House, and they did. We had won the Enviro House! When the meeting had finished, a reporter looted three people’s speeches. Jessica Huijink from room 3, Tanya from room 1, and Jessica Rees-malloch from room 4. Over all, the meeting was extremely interesting. It was a new experience for all us kids. We all left the building with smiles on our faces. The Enviro House was ours!

By Nikki Manson, Adam Kitchen and Tanya Divekar