Year 6 Legacy Art : UPDATE

Last year we started an ENVIRO INITIATIVE whereby the year 6 leavers create some artwork to be displayed at school as a special memory of their time at Howick Primary School. 

In 2024 the year 6 students decorated our water tank - turning it into a giant 'fish tank'! 

This year the students decorated part of the play area - the 'stumps'. 

The students were asked for their ideas how we could decorate them and they voted... 

                                         COUNTRIES & CULTURES was the winner! 

This fits perfectly with the enviroschools guiding principle  'RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY'.

Students researched and sketched up designs of things that were special to them as part of their culture. 

They then outlined and finally painted these onto the stumps. 

Before shot... (after we had sanded them down) 

The AFTER shot! Many, many hours of sanding, priming, designing & painting!

A huge THANK YOU to Zeena that supported the students with their designs and all of the painting for this project.  

Waste Minimisation: Waste Audit

Our school is committed to reducing our waste. 

Every year we do two WASTE AUDITS to check how we are going with putting rubbish in the right bin and thinking of ways to reduce what we are putting in the red landfill bins. 

We collected the landfill rubbish from ALL areas of the school over 6 days. 

We had teams that sorted some at a time:  

- Kea classes (year 0 / 1/ 2) 

- Tui classes  (year 3 / 4 5/ 6) 

- Hall bins

- Staff bins

These items should have been kept for soft plastic recycling

These things should have been put into the green compost bins 

These things should have been put into the yellow recycle bins 

These things were put in the right bin - they have to go to landfill 

We found out that:

> We collected 17.0 kg of waste from the landfill bins.

> This was more than last waste audit (back in March) but we now have another class and we had some playdough which weighed A LOT! We also counted paper towels from the staff areas this time and we didn't include that last time. 

> 45% of the rubbish should have been recycled or composted.  This is about the same as last time. 

> Collecting old, broken pens for our 'special recycling' project was a good idea as the box is now full! 

Three areas we need to keep working on are:

1) Soft plastic - reducing the amount of plastic lunchbox wrappers we see at school.  These are always a problem - blowing around outside and ending up in the food scrap bins! 

2) Paper Towels - in some school areas we seem to use a lot - we can't compost that many! Can we reduce how many we are using? 

3) Paper - some paper is ended up in landfill and we are also using a lot of paper. How can we reduce this? 

Garden to Table: THANK YOU and fundraising!

 As our Garden to Table programme comes to an end for the year we wanted to acknowledge and celebrate all our AMAZING volunteers that make this programme so successful. 

We held a special morning tea to thank ALL the volunteers that have helped our school this year. 

We are very privileged and lucky to have so many volunteers that come every week to help run our Garden to Table programme.

To finish off the year we are also selling excess veggies, herbs AND some jar mixes as a fundraiser for next years enviro projects. 

These make great Christmas presents AND they are zero waste! 

Favours include: 

- Cookies: choc chip cookie mix and Christmas gingerbread shapes 

- brownie mix, lemon & white choc mix and

- muesli bars / breakfast mix. 

WOW trip to Motuihe Island

 On Sunday Aimee. Aurora and Miss Long visited Motuihe Island as part of a prize for collecting so many moth pods earlier in the year! 

We travelled there on a very old boat - Ethel - she was built it 1896! There were 4 other boats too. 

These are the other boats 

 

We sat out on the deck and enjoyed the ride! It took quite a while! On the way we saw some little blue penguins in the sea. 

Aurora helped put up the sail

To get ashore we had to go on a little boat called SEALEGS - it grows 'legs' (wheels) when it reaches the beach!  

When we arrived we heard about the history of the island and how they have made it PREDATOR FREE and now lots of rare native birds live there - including KIWI! There's also Tuatara living there - we saw a tail of one as it disappeared down a hole! 

Sadly Miss Long spotted a few moth pod growing! Even here! So it really is getting EVERYWHERE! 

We need to keep up our work removing this pest weed. 

We went on a big walk exploring some of the island

We saw big tree weta in here

This seagull had made a nest here and had 2 eggs

Huge thank you to... 

PEST FREE HOWICK WARD 

CLASSIC YACHT CHARITABLE TRUST 

MOTUIHE TRUST 

for making this awesome experience possible! 

Walking School Bus trip to MOTAT!

THANK YOU! to Auckland Transport who generously give all our Walking School Bus members FREE tickets to MOTAT! 

Sunday 16th November was a beautifully sunny day for our visit!  

We lived all the interactive activities and riding on the tram. 

Afterwards some of the group had a wander through Western Springs to look for birds.