Celebrating Chinese New Year AND reducing our carbon footprint!

     At Garden to Table recently we celebrated Chinese New Year by making dumplings and chocolate sesame seed biscuits. 

They were delicious! We even made enough to offer some round at the enviro cluster meeting which was the same day after school. 

We are always looking at ways to be more sustainable, and Nigel, from Pest Free Howick set up a clever calculator that could work out how we can reduce our school carbon footprint by growing our own food to eat. 

In our dumplings we grew and used: 

- spring onions

- carrots

- cabbage

- garlic

- garlic chives and regular chives. 

- ginger (shop bought)

Some of these items were harvested in the school holidays and frozen. 

We did buy the dumpling wrappers and soy sauce.  We made about 160 dumplings. 

By using lots of food we had grown ourselves rather than buying it we reducing the carbon that would've been involving in growing, storing and transporting it to us. 

Our carbon saving was the same as: 

- 20 mature trees absorbing CO2 for a whole year

- Driving a petrol car for 100km in New Zealand

Leading the Way: Our Enviro Cluster Meeting 2026

 

What an inspiring afternoon of connection and "green" thinking!

Yesterday we hosted the Enviro Cluster Meeting, bringing together students, teachers, and community members to share our progress and vision for a more sustainable future.

Our enviro vision

Our fantastic student presenters

The energy in the room was electric (and sustainably sourced, of course!). Our student leaders took centre stage, sporting their green bows and hats, to present the incredible strides we’ve made in our environmental initiatives; waste minimisation, our Garden to Table programme and our native tree areas. 

In addition, we had fantastic support from David, one of our Garden to Table leaders, who showcased our veggie garden. We also had some extra snacks (linked to Chinese language week) provided by Victoria and the Garden to Table kitchen crew! 

Garden to Table 2026

Last week we kicked off our Garden to Table programme with Room 1 and Room 4. 

This is the first time the year four students have regular sessions so there was much excitement! 

Prior to the sessions, all students had to pass their knife safety test. This was a great opportunity to put these knife skills into action! 

As a change this week, the table decorations were the giant pumpkins and gourds instead of the posie flowers - a great discussion point! 

On the menu was:

* Herby breadsticks - see recipe HERE

* Veggie pasta in sauce - see recipe HERE

* Zucchini cheddar scones - please ask for the recipe if you would like it

* Choc bliss balls (with the addition of 1/2 cup of grated beetroot & coconut to roll the balls in) 

 - see recipe HERE

 

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?