This week we did our annual Garden to Table Bake Sale!
UPDATE: We made an astounding $627!
This will be used to buy a new electric frying pan, more knives and other kitchen & garden equipment.
This is a bake sale with a few differences...
* The kids do ALL the baking!
* The food is made using garden produce - beetroot brownies, herby breadsticks and pizza scrolls were the favourite!
For all our latest recipes see HERE.
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.
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| Everyone had a turn at planting some seeds |
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| We started to clear the garden bed of weeds |
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| There is a LOT of weeds to clear! |
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Now we need to remember to water our seeds each day. |
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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.
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?
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| Start of waste audit - Tui classrooms R17-4 |
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| lunchbox waste which should've gone home |
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| waste which should've been recycled |
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| waste which should've been composted |
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| waste which was corrected placed in landfill |
It is now half way through the moth plant pod competition and our school has made a great impact on the spread of this invasive weed.
This year we have also had a big focus on educating as many people as possible about this nasty, invasive weed.
We have made a number of posters and done presentations to classes.
I'm super proud of Ciska and Aimee and Piper who went home and came up with their own activity to present to the younger students to educate them about moth pod! Well done girls!
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| A matching pairs game - this helps us learn what all the different parts of a moth pod are like. |
On Friday 22nd March the Year 3/ 4 Enviro Kaitiaki group had their first 'Adopt a Park visit for 2024!
We wanted to:
1) Get to know the park
2) Collect any moth pods
3) Pick up some rubbish.
Sadly we found a LOT of rubbish...and LOTS of moth pods!
We also saw a ginormous rat!
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| All the rubbish we found |
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| Lots of rubbish... not a nice sight! |
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| Some of the pods we found... making use of a disused food caddy bin! |
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| Pod count for this week! |
Our favourite things were...
making the park look clean and getting the rubbish
getting the pods over the stream
walking there
playing at the playground
trying to get those pods up really high and hard to reach - got them!
On Tuesday 19th March the Year 5/ 6 Enviro students attended the 'Eye on Nature' one day activity programme. This enviro programme covers a range of topics educating and empowering students to take action for the environment.
The favourite things were...testing the water quality and seeing the pests that they are trying to keep out of New Zealand.
We learnt...
... if the nitrogen in the water is zero that's good for the water.
... that mice are a pest
... how pests affect the environment
... which bugs re pests or pals.
Activities covered were:
1) PESTS
Looking at animals and plants that are a pest in New Zealand.
We ran around playing tag to illustrate the problem of how moth pod spreads.
We can help by: telling more people about pests and taking part in trying to remove them.
2) BUGS: PEST or PAL?
During this session we learnt about a number of bugs that New Zealand biosecurity is trying very hard to keep out of our country as they are extremely damaging to our fruits and vegetable crops.
We can help by: looking carefully at bugs in our Garden to Table sessions to see if creatures are friends or not.
3) RUBBISH SORTING (TRAFFIC LIGHT BINS)
This was a fantastic refresher for us as it matched our school bin system perfectly. We played a fun relay game running to put rubbish into little coloured bins; red, yellow or green.
We can help by: making sure we put our rubbish in the correct bins and educating others to do this too!
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| Fence post made from soft plastic |
4) WATER TESTING
During this final activity we were scientists! We did a number of experiments to test the water quality and decide how clean or polluted it was - we came out with a score of 90% clean.
We can help by: keeping our water ways clean and making sure the outside drain has only RAIN go down it! Pick up rubbish you see at school or anywhere near a drain.
Our Year 5 / 6 Garden to Table programme has got off to a great start for 2024!
Our students have been creating a wonderful range of food from fritters, muffins and kale chips to pizza scrolls, bliss balls and chocolate chip muffins using vegetables!
See the recipe link HERE for Term 1 recipes. This is updated each week.
We have been learning about food from different places in the world. The next part of this 'food trip' brings us back to New Zeal...
