Growing our Own Vegetables

 This term, two new year 5 and 6 class started Garden to Table.  For some students this was there first time doing the programme so there was much excitement! 

For their first week, they made herby bread sticks, see in the dark ANZAC cookies and greens and cheese fritters. The recipes can be found HERE. 

This programme has been growing in popularity at our school so we made the decision to give ALL classes throughout the school some experience of Garden to Table. 

Why are we growing our own food? 

"It is fun"

" So you don't waste your money at the supermarket"

" So you know how to cook when you are older"

" It teaches us healthy food to make" 

" If we go to the shops we buy all the treat food and  don't want to the healthy stuff" 

" So we know what vegetables look like in real life"

" Because it's fresher and has no pesticides" 

This led into a discussion about growing your own food also being more sustainable.

 

Everyone had a turn at planting some seeds

   

We started to clear the garden bed of weeds

    
 

There is a LOT of weeds to clear! 

Now we need to remember to water our seeds each day.

Our year 2 classes have started doing some gardening this term. They planted radish and beetroot seeds, prepared the garden area by weeding and digging and learned to identify some different vegetables and herbs. All of these had come from our school garden; it included tomatoes, carrots, feijoas and herbs such as basil, parsley and thyme.  

We talked about where we would use these and what they smelt like.  Which was your favourite? 

We then talked about what we could make using some of these vegetables and herbs. Our ideas were salad, soup, curry and pizza.  

Later in the term we will use some garden produce to cook with. 

Waste Audit 2024 Term 1

We are deeply passionate about reducing our waste to landfill. 

We often talk about how waste in landfill is a problem for our environment as food in particular doesn't break down easily and produces methane gas. 

We have monitors that check our 'traffic light bins' in each classroom weekly. 

We did a waste audit in term 1 to see:

* What we are putting in the landfill bin each week?

* Are some things being placed in the wrong bins? What can we do about this? 

* How can we further reduce our landfill waste? 

Results

We had our BEST EVER result of only 1.54kg of waste going to landfill each day! 

We were so happy with this! 

We gave feedback to all staff, including the SKIDS team. 

Our BIG Question: 

How can we support and encourage everyone to keep putting rubbish in the correct bin AND have less landfill waste? 

Start of waste audit - Tui classrooms R17-4

lunchbox waste which should've gone home

waste which should've been recycled

waste which should've been composted

waste which was corrected placed in landfill 

Each area of the school got a report like this: