Night Tour of Zealandia

A small group of us were very fortunate to go on a Night Tour of Zealandia as a reward for all the rat trapping we've been doing lately. What a treat!

Tracking and Trapping

We've laid tracking tunnels around the school last Friday to see what pests are out there. These tracking tunnels had an ink strip on them for collecting foot prints and a dollop of peanut butter in the middle.

On Monday we collected them in to see if we had any footprints. They all had some!

We found hedgehog and mice/rat foot prints (Pretty hard to distinguish!)

Next thing to do is set traps in these locations for the mice and rats.

We also hung up our new nectar feeder that has a sugary syrup in it. (Brought it in for the storm passing through, but will have it back out there as soon as it passes.

Pest Free Tawa

We have become involved in a new venture to make Tawa Pest-free. Today we had visitors form other schools around Tawa along with Darren and a team from Zealandia meeting together and planning how to track, trap, and gather data.

(Click on photo for more images)

Exciting times! We will be laying tracking tunnels around school, seeing what's out there, and then setting traps for rats, mice, and stoats. We will also be putting out bird feeders to encourage more birds to Hampton Hill School.

Bush Explorers at Zealandia

Our school was selected to take 50 kids to Zealandia - it was a case of the first 50 names in and I've never seen such a quick response!! What an amazing time we had. We must try to get the whole school here sometime! Many thanks to the awesome staff on the Education Team at Zealandia - you are fabulous!

Click on the photo to see more from the trip.

Bioblitz 2017

A group of us were very fortunate to be invited over to Koraunui School's Bioblitz today. What an amazing time we had - checking out bees in the "Lab in a box" identifying plants and insects over at the Horoeka reserve and then over to the community hub for all sorts of things! All the while being transported around on a fancy-decorated bus!

Many thanks to Di Christenson and her team for inviting us! (Click on photo to see more)

Vege Garden

Our vege garden sure needed an overhaul after the holidays!

How Wolves Changed Rivers

Singing at the Botanic Gardens

Trip to Johnsonville School

We were very fortunate to visit Johnsonvills School and see what their enviroschool looks like. While we were there we found out about animal trackers and what plants like what.

Many thanks to all the parents who helped transport us to and from there.

Our Rainforest Diaramas

The Amazon Rain forest has been such an incredible thing to study! Click on the image to see other diaramas.

Sunflowers!

Our beautiful sunflowers that we planted last November have finished. What a lovely display they were!

Today we collected up all the seeds - and quickly found that we were dealing with very large numbers!

We counted approximately 250 seeds into a small plastic cup and weighed it. We then weighed all the seeds we had collected - that was 500g. We worked out that 41 little cups could weigh the same as the large bowl of seeds. We then did some multiplying and worked out that 41 times 250 (seeds) was 10250! That's a lot of seeds!!

Our Bike Track

Work has started on our Bike Track. Diggers, concrete mixers, trucks, rollers - you name it, they have been on our school field this week.(- and working over the weekend too!)

This is a fabulous project! Grass is being sown, we've got seedlings in the greenhouse growing,  a large container and bikes will be arriving the start of next term.... yahoo!

Visit to Otari Bush

What a wonderful trip we had to Otari Bush! Being an Enviroschool sure has some wonderful benefits!
We learnt about different types of seed dispersal, collected seeds and planted them*, did some observational drawings of ferns, investigated the water quality of the stream that flows through Otari, and walked up to the 800 year old Rimu tree.

Many thanks to our fabulous parent helpers, the staff at Otari, and our Enviroschool facilitators.

Here are some photos from the day - if you'd like to leave a comment (and yes please do!!) leave it at the bottom of this post rather on the photo peach site - thanks!

Otari on PhotoPeach (* the seeds are now in our plastic bottle greenhouse back at school!)

Enviro Team

We all have a turn at being the 'Enviro team' for a week at our school. This week was our turn!

We tidied up the outside of our plastic bottle greenhouse, planted tomatoes, made seed pottles out of newspaper, sowed pumpkin, sweet pea, and sunflower seeds.












We also weeded the vege garden so it looked really tidy for the 50th celebrations this coming weekend.

Conservation Week

For Conservation Week we had a "Green Day" this year. This was a time when we got into whanau groups and had a fun time doing a variety of enviro-themed activities

Our New Bush Track

A work in progress but huge thanks to everyone who gave up their Saturday morning to come along to a working bee developing a bush track along our "out of bounds" bank.
They made awesome progress - so exciting!

The Plastic Bottle Greenhouse is completed!

 A huge thanks to Jamie, Lily, and Hunter's dad, Scott, who has taken time to see this project through! Scott - we really are excited about this and cant wait until spring to start our planting. The first tomato we grow is a sandwich for you!

RIMU Group's Trip to a Wind Farm

What an absolutely stunning morning to visit the West Wind farm in Makara!! The sky was blue, the sun was shining and there was not a breath of a breeze to be seen.

The Rimu team were met by Carly from Meridian who talked to us about the West Wind farm, when it was established and the logistics of having the wind turbines transported and erected onsite.  The team inquired further by asking questions about how the turbines worked, how they made power, stored the power , distributed the power to households and of course, 'how the heck do people get to the top?'  Little did we know or expect that they would have elevators in them!  Great thinking designers!

After a fantastic talk given by Carly and great questions asked by the children we strolled through a forest loop track that gave us the most amazing views out over the south coast as well as the south Island. Again, we were so lucky to have had a beautiful calm day and a great bunch of parents who were able to come along to support.

A huge thank you to everyone who were able to give their time to support the groups passions and learning.  

by Whaea Kelly

Plastic Bottle Greenhouse

Over the last year we have been collecting plastic bottles for our greenhouse. The BNZ people came on their "Closed for Good" Day last year and cut them all up. Them Jamie, Lily, and Hunter's dad built a solid frame. Tawa ITM were a great help with giving us a discount on the wood.
Bunnings were awesome as well when they donated all the bamboo!


This weekend we managed to get the walls up. All we need to do now is reinforce the insides and prepare for planting in early spring.

A huge thanks to Sarah Opie for helping source resources (with discounts!) and to Scott Bilton for seeing this project through - you are awesome!!

Being awarded with our Enviro Silver stage Certificate

Amanda, our Enviroschool's facilitator, came to our school assembly today and presented us with our with our Enviro Silver Stage Certificate. Aydn and Jackson received it on behalf of our Green Thumbs team and the school.