Ready, Steady GO! Active Travel

We are gearing up for better weather and getting active by walking, biking and scootering to school. 

We are now focusing on a new enviro topic; ACTIVE TRAVEL. 

Our first session kicked off by thinking about what we already know and the benefits of using active travel to school. 

We loved trying the GIANT puzzle! The students worked really well as a team to complete it. Room 1 have the fastest time yet, 5 minutes and 27 seconds! 

We are now running two WALKING SCHOOL BUSES during the week, a great way to reduce cars on roads, get active, walk with friends and spot some wildlife. Oh and WIN some great prizes! 

Get in touch if you would like to join us! b.long@howickprimary.school.nz

  

Planting in our native garden

This week we have been busy planting more natives at school. 

A huge THANK YOU to the sponsor

 Cargo Plus and the nursery Te Whangai Trust for giving us these trees. 

We planted:

* lemonwood

* koromiko

* ribbonwood

* rewarewa

* akeake

Our team of enviro students were excited to see how all the other native trees we planted during the last year were doing. 

We made sure we checked the best growing conditions and what space each tree would need. 

Term 3: Adopt a Park visit

 This week our year 2 & 3 enviro students walked to William Green Domain to do some ACTION to help the environment. 

First we picked up some rubbish in teams of 3 or 4. 

We were shocked how much there was! We found over 25 plastic bottles in just 10 minutes. 

To reduce this we thought visitors to the park could...

"make sure they don't leave rubbish behind"

"take it with them and put it in a recycle bin"

" use reusable bottles so they don't need to keep on buying more plastic bottles. 

Next we had our lunch and explored the playground. 

After that Ranger Abi came and showed us how to remove the weeds round the natives we planted last term.  We learnt the name of some native trees and some interesting facts about them. 

Fact 1: The karo tree was planted from bird poo! 

Fact 2: Cabbage Trees (ti kouka) actually taste like cabbage in the middle! 

Fact 3: Harakeke (flax) has a gel that can be used to sooth sunburn. 

Our very favourite job was WEEDING! We pulled up LOTS of onion weed. All the weeds were stopping the young trees seeing the sunlight. 

Garden to Table - Celebrating with Tongan Food and other delights!

 We have been celebrating food from around the world at Garden to Table this term - from the Cook Islands and Italy to, more recently, Tonga. 

Our menu for Tongan language week was: 

- chop suey

- keke Vai (Tongan pancakes) 

- coconut cookies (Masi Samoa) 

  

We have been using all our seasonal vegetables to create lots of delicious recipes - greens to make risotto and fritters and pizza, lemons to make muffins and bliss balls and carrots to add to our ANZAC biscuits or just eat raw! 

 

We tried using a purple carrot in the ANZAC biscuits recipe instead of the usual orange carrot - it had a fascinating effect! The mixture started off purple, then went blue, after cooking it went green! 

We've also been getting through our kumara stash and collecting bean seeds!