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.

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!

Compost - Wanaka Primary

This week I was invited to go to Wanaka Primary to teach the Zero Waste Education Compost unit to the senior school. We had a ball. I taught five classes each day and they were awesome. Such good thinkers and learners, so many questions and even more enthusiasm. You guys wore me out!

This was by far the hottest week I've taught this unit and it was incredible to be able to do so much of it outside. I'm not sure the worms were into the sunlight though.

All the students now have their own worm farm in a milk bottle and are armed with knowledge about all the different types of composting avail able to them. I've even heard a few parents comment that their children have come home and been through their compost heap in the back yard and started turning it. What fantastic feedback, it makes me really see how worthwhile it is.

Well done Wanaka Primary senior students, a job very well done. I'm back there next week to do reuse with the middle school, I'll have had a good sleep by then and be raring to go again.

Water and Compost at St. Josephs

I was asked if I could come and deliver two of the Zero Waste packages, Water and Compost. Times are busy at St. Joseph's at the moment so I had to adjust the usual way of delivering the modules so we could fit it in.

The seniors have been looking at water recently and they wanted to find out a little more about it before Susie McKeague, the Land Resource Manager from Otago Regional Council comes to visit them. She will be doing some fantastic stream experiments with them. She is also planning two sessions at streams in Wanaka and Queenstown in January. I'll post details here nearer to the time.

It was the first time I'd delivered the water module and it rocked! I love science and this module is all about science and experiments. It is a fairly in depth module and we cover lots of topics about water.

The water cycle, do you know how water moves around our planet? Evaporation, condensation, transpiration, precipitation......do you know what all these fancy words mean? Ask the seniors at St. Jo's, they can now tell you all about it and would probably draw you a cool little diagram to help explain.

Do you know where your waste water goes? Once we'd got the giggles about poos and wees over with we followed the journey of our waste water and considered what happened to it. We soon figured out where all the storm water goes and after looking at various pollutants in water it didn't take long before everyone wanted to wash their cars on the lawn and not let all the soap go down the drain straight into the lake.

For the compost module I had the gardening club and a couple of very interested and enthusiastic parents as helpers. We had a ball and the wide ish age range didn't pose any problems. We had lots of examples of wonderful cooperative learning going on with the older children helping out the younger ones where needed.

For those that were interested in making sure their worm farm was a rip roaring success I held a quick session on how they can go about doing this. I had a few spare wormies left over so we emptied out the old worm farm, finding some gorgeous vermicast in the bottom and started over. Fingers crossed the message will get out about what we can and can't feed them and they'll go from strength to strength. Look out St. Jo's I'm gonna come and check up on them when I'm over!