Year Four - Waka Whenua Kaitaiki

Today Year 4, were learning about kaitiakitanga.  We watched a clip all about the connective relationships of the ocean. We talked about how when one thing is gone, the balance of life and systems are effected. We learned how we can become kaitiaki of places, that our choices can impact our environment. 

What can we do to be kaitiaki? 

Niamh "Everyone should have litter free lunches"

Aarya "The sushi at school has lots of plastic packaging"

Freddie "Stop throwing our plastic on the field"

Muller "When you stand up at lunchtime look around and pick up the plastic"

"When you get a lunch order put your plastic in your bag to take home" Brax

Don "Pick up litter"

We wanted to show tiaki for the environment so went on a rubbish hunt. We cleaned up our environment to protect and help it. Once we gathered all the litter, we counted it then sorted it into groups to answer the question "Where is all the litter coming from at Wakaaranga?".

Some of our groupings:

Soft plastics/ hard plastics

Plastic/ paper/ tin/ fabric

Recyclable/ non-recyclable

Lunchbox waste/ classroom waste

Plastic/ paper/ other

Lunchbox/ paper

Food/ non-food

School litter/ outside litter

Decomposable litter/ non-decomposable litter

Here is what the litter collection told us:

"Most our litter is from our lunchboxes."

"Other amounts of litter come from our classrooms." (Like paper, pencils, hairclips, rulers etc.)

"We have a lot more litter in our school than we realised!"

"The second biggest amount of litter was other."

"Most of our litter is soft plastics."

"A lot of people are just dumping their rubbish in our school."
"There is more lunchbox litter than food litter in the school."

" A lot of our litter came from outside of school."

Here is what we can do about it:

"Bring a litter-free lunchbox"

"Pick up our litter instead of throwing it around our school."

"Take our litter and wrapping home."

"Check our space after lunch-eating and make sure we have picked everything up."

We are Kaitiaki of our whenua at Wakaaranga.

The first two classes alone picked up 1073 pieces of litter from around our kura.  Oh my goodness how can we stop this tide of plastic pollution??

The afternoon classes still managed to find 512 pieces of litter, most from lunchboxes. Oh dear.

Next time we are going to plan some guerilla actions to promote litter free lunches to protect our environment.