Our Year 5 & 6 students from Room 17 and Room 2 have made a great start to our Garden to Table programme for this year.
The gardens are looking tidy, mulched and plentiful already and it's only March! Wow!
In the kitchen the students have been cooking up a range of delicious recipes including Japanese pancakes (Okinomiyaki) flatbread, savoury scrolls and bliss balls. I was amazed how easy the scrolls were to make and feel inspired to have a go at making these at home.
The recipes are below.
WHAT is the Enviro Kaitiaki team?
A groups of students who meet weekly to work on projects to promote helping the environment and educating and empowering others to do the same.
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| 2021 Enviro Kaitiaki reaching Bronze level award |
✔️ A role model of the school value ‘Respect for the Environment’. (E.g wrapper free, pick up rubbish)
✔️ Responsible monitor
✔️ Willing to step up and help when needed
✔️ Confident speaking in front of others
✔️ Enjoy learning and sharing new skills and information (e.g. Traffic Light Bins)
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| 2022 Enviro Art team painting the food scrap bins |
WHO can be in the Enviro Kaitiaki team?
✔️ Year 3,4,5,6
✔️ Anyone passionate about helping nature
✔️ Anyone passionate about being wrapper free and reducing waste
WHAT kind of things do the Kaitiaki do?
This year you can opt into different ENVIRO projects depending on your interests.
Monitors - for the compost bins or Traffic Light Bins.
Responsibilities: checking and, where necessary, emptying bins weekly.
Waste Minimisation - Wrapper Free Project (Year 5/6)
Responsibilities: supporting & educating classes and whanau to reduce the amount of soft plastic in lunchboxes.
Adopt a Park Project (Year 3/4)
Responsibilities: visiting a local park (in school time) to tidy it and monitor the stream
Moth Plant Pod Project (open to everyone)
Responsibilities: collecting pods in school time and out of school hours, educating classes, counting pods.
Trees for Survival (Year 5/6)
Term 3 - more info to come later in the year.
School Native Garden (Year 3 - 6)
Term 2 - more info to come later in the year.
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| 2022 Enviro Art group decorating a whale tail for an Auckland art trail |
HOW do I sign up to be part of the Kaitiaki?
Collect a form from Miss Long, your class teacher or download one HERE.
As we head into the hot, dry months of summer we are extremely happy to have our own sustainable supply of water for our school edible gardens.
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| New water tank - in place for the winter rainfall |
A huge thank you to Auckland Council for the grant to make this happen and to the school PTA for purchasing the water tank initially.
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| Gardening in progress! |
The garden beds still need nurturing and watering over the school holidays to maintain good soil quality for next year. We still have things growing too!
We will be back into our Garden to Table programme in Term 1 2023.
When surveyed, 95% of students who took part in this programme rated it very highly for how much they enjoyed it.
The majority also commented that they felt it had many real life learning benefits.
I know they all enjoyed the kai!
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| Vegetable risotto, kale chips and fruit muffins |
If you are keen to help out with watering or weeding in the holidays please email me: b.long@howickprimary.school.nz
On the morning of Saturday 12th of November there was a Howick Primary School working bee!
For a start, my mum drove me there I had to wear old clothes so it wouldn't matter if they got dirty.
Once we got there I said “hello” and asked for a job, my first one was scooping the compost into a bucket. I did that for a while, then I asked for another job and it was taking staples out of cardboard so it could be recycled and we put it on compost, surprisingly we had enough cardboard to cover all the compost.
My next job was shovelling bark into a wheelbarrow to then put on the cardboard. It took a while but we did it! While we were doing that we stopped for a food break and then we kept going after that. My mum came to pick me up but I asked if I could stay longer? And she said YES!
My mum also said I could go home with one of my friends, for the rest of the time I kept on shovelling bark.
By Sophie Kealey Room 2.
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| Before... |
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| ...After! |
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| Work in progress! |
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| Snack break! |
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| Re-purposing lots of cardboard to suppress weeds |
As term 4 continues we have found ourselves in the lucky position to offer our Year 4 classes each 2 'taster' sessions of Garden to Table prior to them becoming involved in the programme in 2023 when they are in Year 5.
We had much excitement building up to the sessions about what they would be doing and making in the kitchen. We have lots of produce so it gave us lots of choices!
In the kitchen we have made:
Week 3- Imagination salad, which looked amazing! Herby bread chips - a big hit which turned out really well in the air fryer and kawakawa biscuits.
Week 4 - Risotto - also a huge hit (see photos for the recipe), kale chips - which are incredibly easy and were also very popular and rhubarb and apple slice bars (click HERE for recipe). We pre baked the slice for the following group and group 2 made it for the garden working bee which is on the Saturday.
We have also been giving the students some weekly challenges;
1) Name 5 produce in the garden that starts with S.
2) How many 'Garden to Table' verbs can you think of that start with S? See below for how Room 2 and 6 got on!
In the garden we have been busy composting, weeding and prepping for our working bee.
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...
