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?