Water at Glenorchy

Glenorchy Primary was the destination for my first school visit of the year. I always love going up there, such an amazing drive and I always have a wonderful time when I get there, although for some reason I seem to put my forgetful head on as soon as I arrive. I've left a notebook there, but this time I left a whole crate full of resources....ooooops.

Anyway....lets focus on the good stuff. This term the senior room, who now have a new teacher, Mrs. Hamilton, are inquiring into water. So what better way to start off than the Zero Waste Education Water unit. The senior room is a mix of year groups and everyone did so well getting through this unit intended for years 7 & 8.

Since Glenorchy are a Silver Enviroschool I decided to use a few of the ES water activities. We started the day off with making water bracelets and went into the how much is fresh activity.

The day went really well, lots and lots of experiments. We saw how water evaporated from a puddle on the playground, made our own water cycle model, saw the effects vegetation has upon storm water run off, learnt how to change a washer on a tap and finally the river story.

An absolutely fantastic day, I'm really looking forward to hearing what the senior room at Glenorchy will be finding out about water in the next few weeks. In the mean time, I get to spend a Saturday exploring the local hills now I've got to go back and pick my stuff up.

 

 

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!