Queenstown Primary have an Envirogroup

On a Thursday lunch time two students from each of the syndicates at Queenstown Primary get together to meet to discus all the wonderful Enviroschools work they are doing. They've created roles for everyone to do, a secretary, a reporter, a photographer even a presenter for QPS news. Everyone has a job to do.

This will really help to bring together all the work they are doing and help achieve a truly whole school approach. Well done Mrs. Gray, Ms. Reed and everyone else at Queenstown Primary.

Recycling and Compost at Queenstown Primary

Once again it looks like my skills of keeping this blog ultra fresh have escaped me. Hold on tight and get ready of a series of posts to sum up term 2 so far, and boy has it been a busy one.

The term started with a mammoth Zero Waste Education booking at Queenstown Primary. Two teams, two units. Recycling and compost were the subjects and I had a ball working with these 7 classes.

Their school camp this year visited Stewart Island and they wanted to be armed with heaps of knowledge about these two subjects.

I had an absolute ball teaching these units. The responses from each of the classes was amazing, as it always is. During the Recycling unit we look at life cycles and you could just see the amazement on everyone's faces as we explored all of the parts of the process it takes to make a steel can. It certainly makes you think twice about throwing a can in the bin and not in the recycling. What I like best though is it really makes you think twice or ten times before buying something that can't be refilled.

The compost unit is always good fun, although on the make the worm farm day I must admit it gets a little frantic for me to really enjoy myself. I hear that some pretty neat worm farms get made but I don;t always get to see them all......I snapped these pics from Mrs. Fergussons class, I'm sure you'll agree that everyone was having a ball.

Queenstown Primary Enviroschools 2009 Open Day

At the end of last term Queenstown Primary held a fabulous open day to showcase the work the whole school has done over the last year as part of their commitment to becoming an Enviroschool. Now it's just occurred to me that I've given two talks about the day but neglected to write a blog posting about it.

So, shall we cast our minds back to mid December 2009? It was a super hot day, gorgeous blue skies and Queenstown Primary was buzzing over the fact that our Mayor, Clive Geddes, was about to turn up to learn about what QPS has done about becoming more sustainable.

 

So many things really impressed me during this visit, I shall try my best not to go overboard on the descriptions, hopefully the pictures will tell a thousand words. The Kapa Haka group performing to the whole school was the first really impressive thing I saw. You guys were awesome!

 

The tour I was on started with the Middle syndicate. Yes, you heard that right, a tour, we had guides from the one of the senior classes and they certainly knew their stuff. I know these middle syndicate classrooms pretty well now. I've done lots and lots of work with them this year, particularly concerned with worms and worm farms. The middle classes have been looking at their organic waste, monitoring it, designing systems to cope with the volume and type of organic waste they have to deal with each day.

During the investigations it was soon realised that whilst worms are pretty good, they are indeed a little fickle. Thankfully a few teachers in school have chickens at home, so a very simple two bin system has been set up. One bin goes home to the chickens and the other is processed for the worms in school.

 

One of the interesting facts we learnt about worms was that they do not have teeth. Therefore it is very helpful to them is the food they are fed is mushed up. Enter the mincer. Rather cleverly mounted on a large sheet of wood the mincer takes all the worm food and minces it up into a very tasty pulp for them to enjoy. You can see from this pic that it's a great fun job to do at lunch time.

We have one of the QLDC sponsored worm farms on site in the middle playground. But are these students happy with a regular square box for their worms to live in? Of course not......

The Enviroschools kit has so many tools to help our students design solutions for a sustainable outcome. I've done a little work with the middle syndicate using these tools. The design and project planners from the action section of the new kit are just brilliant. In no time at all the students have started asking themselves questions about what they need to know in order to make good choices about the design they want. As you can see they've looked into a few different types.

One of the most ingenious designs they've constructed is the worm tube. We saw a YouTube video about it ages ago and some of the students have adapted it to fit their needs at QPS. Essentially you take a length of old drainage pipe, drill a few holes in the bottom, bury it in your garden to cover the holes. Put in some worms and then some food. The worms eat the food in the pipe, then burrow their way into the garden to lay their vermicast within the soil and roots of the plants growing above. Ingenious. These students have invented a way, using an old ice cream lid, to put in a tray to allow the worms to sit above the garden when it is time to move the tube.

The other middle syndicate classes have been looking at beautifying their school. One project has been to create a mural for the wall outside one of their classrooms. They have looked into the story of Lake Wakatipu and between them, created a mural made of various panels designed by different students to illustrate the story. There was a fairly large unveiling of this panel a few weeks previous to the open day, where the kapa haka group did a fantastic performance and the students involved in the creation of the mural explained what it all meant to each of them. All of this was on show inside one of the classrooms.

 

  

One of the senior syndicates has looked at water, where it comes from, how we consume it, how we can conserve it and also how it is seen and dealt with in other parts of the world. One of their classrooms was decked out with heaps of information that they'd found out. There were various experiments going on demonstrating what normal everyday household chemicals could do to our water supply.

 

 

There was also heaps of information available about the visit we paid to Mt Grand, the water purification plant in Dunedin, on last years Otago Regional Enviroschools Hui.

We then moved onto the junior syndicate. Boy oh boy, have these guys been busy. They have fully embraced the concept of 'Zero Waste'. They started off with a waste audit to get information about the types of waste they generated. Now that they knew what they had, they caould do something about it.

It was generally food packaging that was the problem. Which foods did it come with and could they still get the same food but without the packaging? Well it seems like you can.

After some rather mammoth counting exercises these students identified how many large packets of chips they needed to buy each week so they could put them in reusable containers to bring to school each day. Still having the same amount of chips as you get in a small packet, but without the waste.

Can you make muesli bars at home and bring them in in baking paper? Of course you can. They took a visit to the recycling station out at Frankton, where the students just loved seeing what happened to their recycling once it left school. It's so good to be able to see where it goes and confirm that making sure everything is nice and clean does make a difference.

 I even heard Mrs Walker asking Mr Weston if it would be possible to remove their rubbish bins from the junior playground as they didn't use them any more. Isn't that amazing? Well done everyone!

As we moved through the junior department we found some paper making going on. It's one thing sending your paper to be recycled, but a whole other, way more fun thing to make some paper yourself at school. You can make some pretty cool cards from the paper you made too.

 

Finally we found some students from a senior syndicate who had been looking that their school and coming up with some inventive ways of changing it. where could they put playgrounds? Where  would be good for a vege garden? What is reasonable to change and what should we leave? One of the best ways to get your idea across is by using a well constructed model. The ones we saw were amazing, apparently though I'm too big for the zip slide.

 

So there we have it, QPS's Enviroschools work for 2009 in a nutshell. I'd just like to thank all the students, teachers and other staff there for making working with them so much fun last year. In particular though I'd like t ogive some special thanks to Mrs Walker and Mrs Gray, who have done some outstanding work at school to make all of this happen. Well done everyone!

Worm Farming at Queenstown Primary

I've been really lucky to do lots of work at Queenstown Primary this year. One of the topics that I've done heaps of work on has been with the middle syndicate and them learning about how to deal with organic waste. One of the things they've investigated is worm farms. Now that the weather is finally warming up it was time last week to get their worm farm up and running.

As usual the children were awesome, so enthusiastic and full of energy. To make the most of the great weather, we we all congregated outside and had a quick refresher about worms, how and what we feed them, as well as any other things we could do to make their lives happy.

We found a nice spot under a tree, close to where lunch is eaten, but, also off the beaten track a little. Perfect! Everybody had a go at shredding newspaper, remember it has a grain so will rip vertically really easily but horizontally is a bit of a disaster. After dampening it with some water it is ready to make a nice bed for the bottom of the worm far.

After adding the worms, which have been touring the classrooms over the last few weeks, we gave them some more food from today's lunch. All nicely chopped down to bite size pieces. Covered them up with some more shredded paper and then put the lid on. Simple, fun and a fantastic way to deal with the food waste from lunch times in a responsible way.

Great work Queenstown Primary!

Queenstown Primary - The Big Picture

As part of Queenstown Primary's amazing commitment to Enviroschools this year they are keeping me very busy. I've very kindly been asked to visit pretty much every class in school and use the 'Big Picture' from the kit to help explain Sustainability to the students and teachers. This activity is proving to be absolutely fantastic .

I've adapted this activity to work across lots of different age levels. With the middles and the senior I start the 45 minute session with a brainstorm session about the words 'Sustainable' and 'Sustainability'.

I've found that at the begining of the sessions about half the class have heard these words but aside form a few very switched on students most are a little unsure as to what it actually means. It is such a hard word to really get your head around so it's no surprise is it?

We spend about 20 minutes to half an hour figuring it out between ourselves. After an overall chat I split the discussion into different topics;

• Waste
• Water
• Transport
• Energy
• Leisure

We then split into five groups. Each group is given a topic and they need to have a look through the picture and find elements of their topic. they wrtie dow nwhat they find and in the final 7 minutes or so each group presents what they've fonud to the rest of the class. By the end these guys really do have a great understanding of 'Sustianable' & 'Sustainability'.

With the juniors it's a little different. After a quick experiment with the first class I decided we were looking for different things. So our new topics are;

• Food
• Transport
• Hobbies
• Water

Again the split into groups and they draw or write what they find. Spelling doesn't matter at all. It's the concept that is important. You see them really looking into the picture and from what a couple of the teachers tell me they have had some awesome discussions afterwards and the children are already starting to talk about what activities they'd like to be involved in.

Glad Wrap Snails - Queenstown Primary

Mrs. Fergusson set about doing a school wide experiment without anyone knowing. She had a plan afoot and decided a little secrecy was perhaps the best way of going about. She wanted to show the school the problem they have with Glad Warp and their lunches.

The idea was that her class was collecting Glad Wrap for an art project. They collected as much Glad Wrap as they could lay their hands on from school lunches for the first four days of the week. They collected 2 huge black bin sacks full of the stuff. The plan was for the artwork to be unveiled at the school assembly on Friday afternoon.

It wasn't until Friday morning that she told her class that the art project was in fact to build a huge glad wrap snail to help demonstrate how much glad wrap is used for school lunches and hopefully shock a few students and parents into moving towards a packaging free lunch.

I was asked if I could go along and help facilitate the making of the snail. It seemed like a fabulous idea to me and a great way for me to meet a senior class.

Everyone in the class was so into it, especially once they found out what it was for. We all had a go at twisting the bits of Glad Wrap and then tieing reef knots between each piece to form a very long piece of Glad Warp.

We recorded on the board how many meters had been twisted together and the then strip was hand d over to the snail maker group. Mrs. Fergusson had the fantastic idea of sticking 6 real estate boards together to make a board to mount the shell onto. We all thought this was going to be enough. How wrong we all were.

As it turns out there was almost 350m of Glad Wrap collected. We managed to make 3 adult snails shells spanning 6 real estate boards each. The rest of the snail was painted onto the boards and then the class presented them to the whole school during assembly. They are going to repeat the experiment at the end of term one. fingers crossed we will only have some baby snails....

I think this is a fantastic way to visually how much of this non recyclable waste is generated in Queesntown Primary in one week. The class have also prepared some information for parents to go in the school newsletter so they can find out how easy it is for their children to have a packaging free lunch.

Well done Mrs. Fergussons class, job well done!
Look we even made the paper! Get a copy of this weeks Queenstown Mirror and have a look. Well done Queenstown Primary.

Brainstorming Sustainable - An Intorodcution to Enviroschools

I was invited to Rooms 16 & 17 to help them kick off their year and school wide focus on Enviroschools. What an offer. We decided one of the best ways to do this was to explore the idea of the word 'Sustainable' & 'Sustainability' and what it meant to the children.

We had so much fun. The children were awesome and we soon got into the nitty gritty of what the word meant to them. Where things came from, as in resources, how we cna renew them and why we used resources that we couldn't use. So many ideas.

We had a think about Water, Waste, Energy, Leisure and transport. Then using the fabulous big picture form the Enviuroschools kit we split into groups. Each group had one subject and their mission was to look at the picture and find as many elements of their topic as possible. Armed with paper, used on one side of course, and some pens the groups set about their search.

They had about 10 minuts to get investigating then one person from each group came and presented back to the whole class. You guys were awesome. The investigation was fabulous and pretty much no stone was left unturned.

Both these classes now have a much better understanding of what these words mean and from what I could see they are already thinking about what they can do as part of being an Enviroschool. Well done Queenstown Primary.

Taking Action - Room 23 Queenstown Primary

Last week I took a sneaky peek at the vision maps created by Room 23 and I couldn't wait to get in the class room and see what the children had been discussing. Their inquiry is 'How to beautify our school'. They have these maps outside their classroom and invite anyone to add their suggestions to them.

I'd been asked if I could come and facilitate a session to help the children plan some action projects. Awesome, time for me to dig into the fabulous tools in Section 3 of the kit. One of my favourites.

We started with a brief discussion of all the things they would like to see in school, much of this was to do with animals, somehow I think that having a sea lion at school may be a bit much, however there is no reason why they can't take some action to help better the quality of life of sea lions within NZ.

With all the different ideas written down we made a decision making matrix and figured out which were the most popular projects, rabbits & worm farms seemed pretty popular.

Time to split into groups and get out the Action Planners, page 406 of the kit. I love this page, it is so powerful. We write down our vision at the top, eg. 'We want to use worms to take care of some of our organic waste'. We then start to investigate what we need to do in order to reach this vision. This page has different sections with guiding questions to help the children out. What we end up with is a list of tasks and ideas that we can take action upon. So simple, so powerful and so much fun. Well done Enviroschools for developing such a powerful tool.

The session was over in a flash, the classroom was a buzz of excited productive conversation. They've still got a fair bit of work to do to achieve these visions but they are on the right track. Well done Room 23!

Living Landscapes - Queenstown Primary

With the success of Spud-In-A-Bucket only recently behind us it was time for me to don my Enviroschools hat and go back to Queenstown Primary for a session from the Living Landscapes section of the Enviroschools kit. After some discussion with the teachers we decided to have a session on 'Healthy soils, healthy plants, healthy people' page 188 of the kit.

What this activity does is introduce the children to different soil types, is it sandy? is it moist? does it hold water well? I've a couple of experiments to do to show the difference between the way compost holds water versus sandy rocky dirt.

Once we have a bit of an idea about what different soil types look like it's time to go and explore. We split into different groups and off we went, ice cream tubs in hand to collect different soil samples.

With the samples in each group each drew a map of where they got their soil from. These results will be added to the main vision map once it is developed next year, this is great practice for mapping skills.

All we have to do now is identify the different soil types using the chart on page 190. And the results? No surprise here, the soil from the existing gardens was the best, closely followed by the area above the courts. Otherwise we will have some work to do in enriching the soil in other areas if we are going to have rich healthy plants growing.

Great work everyone, what a fantastic activity and so good to spend a lesson outside, this is what it's all about, getting amongst it.

Spud-In-A-Bucket: Queenstown Primary

Spud-In-A-Bucket is a project run by Tāhuri Whenua, the National Māori Vegetable Growers Collective. It's aim is to

• Stimulate critical questioning on resource use and lifestyle
  
• Expose children to a sense of responsibility and ownership
  
• Encourage parental interaction with children about their learning
  
• Foster positive relationships between schools and their communities
  
• Promote the relevance of tikanga Maori in modern horticulture

One of my colleagues, Ben Elms, or Dr. Compost as many of you Lakes Districts residents will know him, volunteered his time to help Hawea Flat and Queenstown Primary along with this project. Wastebusters Kindly volunteered some of my time to help him out.

So how does it work? Schools apply to be part of the program, so if you're interested in being involved next year go to the Tāhuri Whenua website and find the application form. Buckets and compost are supplied by local sponsors, a big hand goes out to Dave Hannon from Delta for very kindly donating the compost, thanks guys!

We were supplied with a few bag fulls of Maori potatoes to use as seeds, we had a few varieties, one of them was purple, yes I know, who's ever seen a purple potato before? All we needed now was the children, and we had quite a few of them.

The children fill the buckets about a third full with compost, place the potato in the middle and then add more compost until it is about three quarters full. Fairly simple really. All they have to do now is remember to water them and make sure they get access to sunlight. The other trick with potatoes is to realise that we may need to add more compost as they grow. Keep your eyes peeled here for some updates on how they are coming along.

You can check out Room 17's blog for their take on the project.

If you'd like to see some more photos from this take a look at Room 17's Blog.

I knew that Queenstown Primary had been looking at growing things but I'd no idea how much work they had done, I visited a few classrooms and there were growing experiments everywhere, as well as the beginnings of some fabulous vision maps. Well done everyone! I'm looking forward to coming back in a week or so to do some Enviroschools work with you all.