Year Five Cooperate and Compete to Get to School Safely

  Today, Year Five continued their sustainable energy Travelwise study.  We first used our digital skills to plan a safe, active travel route from home to school on the Auckland Transport Journey Planner. 

We are learning to work together as a team to identify road hazards and overcome them. 

We competed with other classes to solve another giant jigsaw.  Last week, we voted to make our competition girls vs. boys. Here's the timed results: 

Rooms 14 & 17 Girls 6:05

Rooms  14 & 17 Boys 6:30

Rooms  15 & 16 Girls 5:49 WINNERS!!

Rooms   15 & 16 Boys 8:31

We decided that working as a team helped us work faster and making it a competition made it more fun.

Next, we put red flags on the children acting in unsafe ways and talked about how we could solve these problems so they could move about safely.

While one team was making the jigsaw, the other team first read through our Enviro blog. Then, visiting the native bush walk, we used magnifying glasses to take a closer look... 

Kids Eating Seasonal Kai

 Today, we went on an autumn kai hunt to see how the food we grow at school changes over the seasons. In summer/raumati we could pick pears and apples. Now we can pick carrots. Some of us wrote recounts about our outside adventure.

We learned that eating in season means, cheaper, fresher and more sustainable kai. In our books we created a cut and paste seasonal kai chart and finished with a fun word search. We talked about how what we eat changes over the year.  For example, we eat cherries at Christmas time  and feijoas in autumn. Lots of citrus fruit is available  in winter right when we need the  extra Vitimin C for coughs and colds.

We finished our lesson by eating the  carrots we had picked.

Eco Warriors Unboxing Our Eye On Nature Treats

 Today, our Eco Warriors excitedly unboxed the treats from Eye On Nature. There's so many cool things to help us take action to help our local environment!

We can't wait to make beeswax wraps, put out tracker tunnels, make cardboard bikes, plant carrots and much more!  Thanks so much to the Manukau Beautification Trust and all the groups involved! 

Room 21 Investigate Waka Waste

 Today Room 21 met with Ms Daniel to investigate waste at Waka.  We learnt about the difference between circular economies, where waste isn't really waste as it always turns into something else and linear economies, that end up in an earth filled with trash.

For example, in a circular economy we grow apples that are harvested and their cores are turned into compost that is then put on the apple trees to grow more. Nothing runs out and nothing is junked up. It is sustainable - keeps on going round and round.

For example in a linear economy we grow apples and turn them into apple sauce that we package into plastic pouches.  The plastic pouches can't be recycled and end up in a landfill.  The nutrients from the food scraps are wasted and the earth and oceans are quickly junked up with plastic that doesn't break down. It's a one way street.

We collected litter to see if the waste at Waka is a problem.  There was much less litter than last year, but sadly there was still plastic packets from lunchboxes.  

In Room 21 there was 12/31 litterfree lunches.  Well done to those families making the extra effort!

We decided a litterefree lunchbox competition next term would be great.  We also decided to make emotive posters to share around the school and online.

Year 4 dive deep into looking at our Healthy Moana

 Today Year 4 continued their inquiry into our local moana.  We were concerned with how humans are acting to preserve the precious seas.

Did you know that New Zealand has the 5th largest ocean space on the planet!

We learnt about marine reserves where humans can visit and enjoy the moana, but there is absolutely no taking of anything natural and no feeding of wildlife. Long Bay is our closest reserve.  Have you visited?

We did a bus stop activity in groups. What do we already know? What is the purpose of a marine reserve? What can't you do at a marine reserve?

We saw videos that showed the amazing difference between the seas in reserves and inside our unprotected harbours.

Our last action was to create a chart in our books showing what can and cannot occur in marine reserves.

Year 6 Introduction to our local Esturary

 Year 6 launched into their new inquiry looking deeply into our local estuary.  We began by defining what an estuary is and locating the Tamaki Estuary.  We read information and recorded what we had found alongside our own experiences. You can see our mahi here

We're looking forward to devising questions to guide our action learning, talking to experts and creating actions to help our local waterway.

Our estuary is a beautiful place to spend time.

Our estuary is a beautiful place to spend time.

Ms Daniel walks her dog along the estuary every morning.