Tasman Nelson Environment Award

We were very excited to win the Tasman Nelson Environment Award for 2009. This year has been a very busy year for all the students involved in enviro activities.

Rooms 1 and 7 have been making GOOS pads all year.

Room 7 has collected food scraps every lunch time and added them to our bokashi and for Poppy the pig.

Room 6 collects the food scraps from the staffroom and adds them to the bokashi.

Senior students have regularly monitored Poorman Stream.

Other senior students planted out 100 natives along Poorman Stream.

Room 16 have feed and watered our worm farm all year.

The whole school entered the Waste Challenge and made amazing art from food rubbish.

Year 5's are well on the way in planning their ecohut- Whare Takiwa.

Room 10 has planted the herb garden.

Next year we have a new garden planned where children can play in the native plants.

Governor General Visits Our Garden

On Thursday 22 October the Hon Sir Anand Satyanand and his wife Lady Susan Satyanand visited our school. They were very interested in the things we are doing as a school to help our local environment.

Two students escorted the Governor General and his wife up to our edible garden and talked about the vegetables that have been planted, the bokashi and future plans at the garden.

One student gave them each a GOOS (Good On One Side) pad made from scrap paper, and talked about how the pads are made and then sold to children and parents.

Lady Satyanand gave us many good ideas for improving our garden. Did you know rhubarb spray is good to stop insects eating the vegetables? Corn likes to talk to each other so plant them close together.

This photo was taken by The Nelson Mail.

350 Aotearoa

Today three Nayland Primary students joined Nayland College students to create big feet and murals to take action against climate change.

Did you know that 350 ppm is the safe upper limit of CO2 in our atmosphere- we're at 387, and rising?

On the 24th October thousands of New Zealanders will be taking action on the International Day of Climate Action.

Our students enjoyed working with the college and taking part in this.

Planting at Poorman Stream

Today we went with Nelmac and planted 100 native plants along the banks of Poorman Stream next to our school. We planted flaxes, kowhai, manuka and some other native bushes.

Our aim is to plant the stream banks in natives to attract birds and provide shade for the stream. Previously there were a lot of self seeded trees that are classed as weeds like plum trees. Nelmac has cleared many of these so we can plant the natives.

The children will be able to watch their trees growing.

Stream Monitoring Term 3

Our stream monitoring for Term 3 found the stream in excellent health. We found lots of mayflies which are the most sensitive macro-invertebrates.

We were joined by a group of Broadgreen Intermediate students. It was fun sharing our learning with them.

Zero Waste Prize

Sarah Langi and Bronwyn, from Bunnings, came to our school assembly to present our prize from the Zero Waste challenge.

We were thrilled to get a wheelbarrow full of all sorts of gardening equipment. Thank you Bunnings!

We will certainly use all these in our garden this spring.

The Zero Waste Challenge

At the end of May, the month of the Zero Waste Challenge, classes were asked to create an artwork from the collected lunch rubbish. The results were amazing with things like flowers to robots to bags! They are now on display to show just what can be done with rubbish!

Stream Monitoring

On Wednesday 27 May the stream group monitored Poorman Stream. This is completed once a term and results are entered on the GLOBE website.

We found the stream to be in very good health from the tests we conducted, with some sensitive invertebrates, but there was not a lot of stream life found. The water temperature, conductivity, PH and clarity all came out excellent.

Mrs Gulbransen joined us and a parent. We welcome any interested people in the community to join us on these occassions.

Chippie Bag Collection

As part of  The Zero Waste Challenge children have been collecting the empty chip bags from children's lunch boxes. They then strung them together to see how long the collection would be.

This was shown at our whole school assembly on Friday.

The challenge is:

To reduce the number of chip bags at school next week.

At the end of this week they will string the bags together again and compare the two lengths.