2020 - Caught being good!

Room 6 were caught being good! Instead of playing a game for their brain break activity, Room 6 went out and picked up all the bark that had come out of the junior playground. They were showing the value responsibility - taking care of our environment. Mrs Yates was so pleased, she gave everyone a token (including Mrs Kumar). Ka pai Room 6!

Room 2 takes on Bugingham Palace

Room 2 has been taking care of Bugingham Palace this year.  We visited as often as we could, and cleaned out dead leaves and branches, and added some fresh leaves and branches. The students of Room 2 would try their best to find new bugs and insects to add to the Palace, but this did prove to be quite tricky at times. In the classroom we would discuss the importance of bugs and insects in our environment. 

2020 Term 3 Stream Clean

This term the Kaitiaki Kids went down to our local stream to do a clean up and see what sort of rubbish is being left around the community. It was very tricky to even get down to the stream because there was lots of overgrown trees in our way. We did find a lot of rubbish along the grass close to the stream. There is also a local hangout called "the tree" which had lots of rubbish in it. Altogether we managed to collect 6 bags of rubbish.

What's next?

• Write a letter to our local government asking them to trim the bushes around the stream so we can go and do a stream clean up - we could see a lot of rubbish but couldn't get to it.
• Write a letter to our local government to ask about cleaning up around "the tree" as there is a lot of broken glass. We also want to ask them to trim the branches and remove the dangerous tree hut that has been made.
• Write a script and speak at whole school assembly about the amount of litter found and what we should be doing as a school.

2020 Butterfly Garden Planting

  

We really enjoyed helping plant the seeds to attract butterflies to our garden in spring. (Chloe & Elizabeth)

First we helped to remove all the weeds. (William) 

Then we used shovels to turn over the soil. (Noah)

Alex used a rake to smooth the soil where we planted the seeds. (Rory & Callum)

We used watering cans to gently water the soil. (Ida, Yi Lin & Thea)

We can't wait to see how many butterflies will come and visit us soon. (Brooklyn & Elenoa)

2020 Term 3 Litter Free Lunch Draw

 

 

Well done Noah and Aaron on a great Litter Free Lunch presentation at assembly. The students were so excited to receive their lunchboxes as prizes for bringing a litter free lunch to school.

2020 How to make worm tea

Ali and Ava from Room 22 have helped Miss Donnell to make this awesome 'behind the scenes' video on how we make worm tea at Elm Park School. If you are looking to buy some, Room 22 are selling it. 

 

2019 Growing Sunflowers

The Kaitiaki Kids have been looking at how effective our Worm Tea is. To test this theory, we planted some sunflower seeds in pots. Some of the sunflower seeds got worm tea and water, and others just got water. We left the pots in the same place so they had the same conditions to grow in.

The plants grew for 4 weeks. At the end of the 4 weeks we found that the total height of the Worm Tea plants was 92cm. The plants with no worm tea grew to 79cm. That is a difference of 13cm!

We have shared this information with the class who is selling worm tea because they will be able to market the worm tea as helping plants to grow quickly. We also want to share the results with the community so they buy our worm tea!

	Plant 1	Plant 2	Plant 3	Plant 4	Plant 5	Plant 6
	Yes worm tea	Yes worm tea	No worm tea	No worm tea	Yes worm tea	No worm tea
Week 4	3cm	1cm	3cm	1.5cm	4cm	3cm
Week 6	16cm	7cm	9cm	12cm	19cm	19cm
Week 7	37cm	25cm	26cm	23cm	30cm	30cm
	1st	4th	3rd	5th	2nd equal	2nd equal

2020 Garden to Table: Lemonade

 
Miss Donnell showed us the lemonade tree growing outside Room 26/27. There were so many lemons growing on the tree but no one was using them! We decided that we would make some lemonade. First we had to pick the lemons off the tree. It was quite tricky to pick them all off.

 

We picked off so many lemons but we didn't know how many we had! Miss Donnell showed us how to put the lemons into groups of 10 so we could use our skip counting knowledge. After we had put them all into groups of 10 we counted each group. We had a total of 268 lemons.

 

Then we had to sort the lemons. Some lemons were bruised, were too small and had green on them. We made a pile of lemons that we could use for our lemonade, and the rest of them lemons went into our compost bin.

 

 Miss Donnell found a great lemonade recipe and an activity to show us how we make the lemonade and what ingredients we need. Our biggest job was juicing all of the lemons. It was tricky to try and squeeze all the juice out.

While we were juicing the lemons, Miss Donnell mixed the sugar and boiling water together to make a syrup. Once we had all the juice, we mixed the syrup, lemon juice and cold water together. We had to put our big pitcher of lemonade in the freezer to cool down.

           
                                                                 Here is us having our first taste of lemonade!

2018 Kapa Haka Festival

2018 Stream Clean Up

 

The Year 5 students went out to our local stream to do a stream clean up. It's disappointing to see so much rubbish being dumped in our community but great to see that we have so many tidy kiwi's committed to cleaning up our environment.

2019 Forest Tour

To introduce our inquiry about NZ species, the Year 1 teachers created an awesome forest tour. Each teacher was a unique NZ species, and with the help of Mrs Tetupu our guide, showcased their species features and highlighted the idea that they were native to New Zealand. An informative and fun way for children to learn about NZ native species!

2019 Tree QR Codes

 
The Kaitiaki Kids have been hard at work looking at ways to care for the trees around our school. They researched the trees and made short videos about the trees and how to care for them. Miss Donnell created QR codes with the videos and we spent our lunchtime putting them around the school under the trees. Make sure to have a listen next time you walk by.

2019 Matariki Soup

 

 In  celebration of Matariki Room 30 made Matariki soup. The children were all given a job we had waitresses taking the orders, a head chef, kitchen hands and children cutting and peeling the vegetables. The children thoroughly enjoyed being apart of a restaurant environment and to their teachers surprise were wanting more vegetable soup! Kia kaha Room 30!

2019 Bread Bag + Tag Collection

        

A Facebook post from Mrs Allen to ask for our community's help in collecting bread bags and tags to be recycled. We are still collecting these so if you have any please bring them into school.

2019 Tiritiri Matangi Trip

Some of the Year 5's (Room 23 and half of Room 24) went on an amazing trip to Tiritiri Matangi today. It was a bit of a rocky ride on the way over in the ferry but once we got to the island we saw lots of beautiful endemic birds, trees and scenery. We also went on a Scavenger Hunt, visited the light house, watch house and Hobbes Beach amongst other things.

A huge thank to the Tiritiri Matangi Growing Minds funding programme which allowed our students to have a free ferry trip to the island, and also the very knowledgeable TIritiri volunteers who were our fabulous guides for the day.

2019 Celebration Concert

Elm Park held a Celebration Concert as a way to showcase our fabulous cultural and dance groups. Each year level had a song to perform and there were a few whole school songs.

Groups that performed included our Indian dance group, Year 3/4 Hip Hop, Year 5/6 Hip Hop, Korean Fan dance and our Elm Park School Kapa Haka group. We also had a surprise performance from our fabulous teachers!

It was great to have so many parents and caregivers along to help us see out another successful year.

2018 Bugingham Palace

Check out Room 25's blog about the creation of their bug hotel 'Bugingham Palace' located on our school field. 

2017 Check out our Worm Farm

2017 Growing Potatoes

2017 Celebrating Chinese New Year