Cooking Broad Beans

Broad Beans on PhotoPeach


Today the garden group picked and cooked broad beans. They experimented with different ways of cooking them.

Harakeke Posts

Each class has painted, carved or added mosaics on a post to put by their class harakeke. These have been cemented in and are looking amazing!

Some children from Room 10 were so keen to help that they stayed at school till 4 o'clock helping cement the posts!

Gardening

Yes. It's the last day of term and we are gardening.

In go our vegetables and herbs ready for eating next term!

Yum, can't wait.

Stream Monitoring Term 3

We completed our third stream monitoring for this year. The stream was in very good health with lots of big mayfly easily found. We had the added company of the resident black cat. It was very interested in what we were doing!

KEG's This Week

This week the children tested the soil. They found it to be quite sandy with an acidic pH value of around 6. The garden was weeded and forked over. We picked and compared the green to red lettuce leaves. The plants and seedlings were watered with the fertiliser we made. We planted peas in with the beans to make a 'legume' bed.

Planting at Poorman Stream

Yesterday a group of senior syndicate students helped Steve from Nelmac plant out some native plants alongside Poorman Stream. We planted harakeke, grasses and kowhai.

This is our third year of planting at this site and it is starting to look better with plants from previous plantings getting established. Despite this, however, this site also hosts every bad weed possible according to Steve.

Lets hope that with continued planting and a helping hand from Nelmac that one day this part of the stream becomes an attractive riparian site.

Movie Makers

Members of the Enviro team have been transformed into movie makers creating a movie for The Outlook for Someday competition.

Our movie is called, 'Taming the Litterbugs.'

It has been lots of fun.

Ecofest 2010

This year we took Susie to Ecofest.

Susie has a wearable art costume designed by Room 10 children based on native plants. She is wearing harakeke, manuka flowers, pohutakawa flowers, a kowhai necklace and a tree fern.

Learning about soil

We did an investigation into what bugs are in our soil. We found heaps of worms and centipedes.

KEGS at Work

We are now a part of the Kids Edible Garden programme so each week our facilitator, Lyndsey, works with children in the garden.

This week we were putting coffee grinds around the garden as free fertiliser. We then made our own fertiliser with chamomile.

We also got to play a game to teach us the Maori names for the vegetables.

More Planting!

Today it was open to the school to help get our seedlings planted up into the root trainers.

Well done to all the juniors who came up so enthusiastic! They filled the root trainers so the middle and senior syndicate children could pot the seedlings.

What a great school team effort.

Plant Propagating

Senior students had their first experience of potting up seedlings into root trainers today. The memorable thing from their first experience must be ANTS!

Yes, ants were happily nesting through the root trainer box. Hence some children were on the task of eliminating ants while others started to pot up some seedlings donated by Titoki Nursery.

However, at the end of the day the ants won and we retreated until we can deal with the invasion!

Roll on ant stories next week.

School On Saturday

For some children it was school in action for our 50th Celebrations.

Room 6 and 10 children made use of the silverbeet in our garden to make silverbeet patties.

What a success! They were delicious!

Stream Monitoring Term 1 2011

A new group of River Rockets, learnt the science of stream monitoring and the Maori perspectives and importance placed on water. Children conducted tests and searched for 'bugs'. Our findings concluded that Poorman Stream was in very good health with many mayflies and caddisflies found easily.

Cooking Kiwiana Style

Thanks to Isabelle, our dorking pullet, and all her eggs many classes have been learning the art of the Kiwiana classic, the PAVALOVA !

See the eggs we found and look at the yummy result!

Getting Cooking

Cooking on PhotoPeach

Now that we can automatically water our vegetable garden over the summer holidays we come back to an impressive supply of vegetables that make up our cooking.

Room 2 were making tomato chutney which will give us yummy morning teas with cheese and crackers.

Room 10 made silverbeet and ricotta filo parcels. These were also shared with other students in the school.

Room 6 made tomato and cheese tasters.

Our vege garden will be providing us with lots of cooking to come!!

Treasure Hunt

We have been having a treasure hunt for potatoes to see if we can find them all!

Tomorrow we are going to be cooking them and making potato salad.