The Year 5 and 6 Sustainable Elective have continued to develop their understanding of what Kai, Community and Sustainability means to them.  Through this learning, they are working in teams to grow vegetables for our school and community. We have five vegetable gardens and a growing orchard.  At the moment, we have carrots, celery and cauliflower growing and lemons ready to pick.  Some of the veggies won't be ready to eat by the end of our study, so we have been taste testing too.  We are very concerned about not wasting excess food, so we have come up with a plan.  Keep an eye

out for our creative plan.

On Tuesday 21 May at the student breakfast meeting for the Living Room Specialist students, we were lucky to have a meeting with Tony McKenna from the Inkshop.  The Inkshop specialises in printer cartridges that have been recycled to 'as good as new' and sells them at a price that is a lot cheaper than the original product.  At our meeting, Tony explained the recycling process and how this helps to stop waste going into the landfill.  Our students learnt about the 'closed recycling process' and how we can collect cartridges at our school to recycle them and sell them back to The Inkshop.  The money we gain from this, we can put back into our sustainable projects.  We have been working with Tony over the last two years and we put money towards our garden shed and vegetables gardens.  

Students in the Year 3 and 4 Sustainable Elective are learning about honeybees and how we can help them survive.  To do this we need to find out the scientific features of honeybees. All our students are scientists.  They are exploring the parts of a bee, including the proboscis used for sipping nectar from flowers and the antennae used for smelling, touching and tasting.   Each week, students record their information in their personal glossaries after experimenting and researching.

Exploring what it might be like to have a proboscis.

Bee watching looking for patterns of activity

Using the digital microscope to see the parts of insects up close.

Tasting different types of honey to compare tastes.  Honey sipped from different flowers is made into different honey by bees. We tasted Rata honey and Clover honey.  Clover honey was the most popular.




















This is a smell test to see if we can identify the five different smells.  Bees
smell very accurately from long distances.

The students in the Year 5 and 6 Sustainable Elective have all been working on a logo that reflects the key concepts in our ongoing elective study.  These key concepts are Sustainability, Kia (food) and Community.  We learnt that a logo needs to be concise, give a lot of information from a simple picture, be bright and colourful and show our project so that everyone can understand it easily, even if they don't know about our project.  All the students looked at the logos and the journal entry that explained them and then used two votes to choose one logo.  It was a very close final decision with only one vote difference.  Congratulations to Abby and Maia.  Maia's creative and informative logo will be used for  our project, along with her message.

Journal Entry 9/5/13 By Maia

My logo is in the form of an apple.  It shows kai and sustainability because we grow fruit and vegetables.  The apple skin is patterned like the Earth and the Earth is our whole community.  If we all used sustainability, we could reduce our carbon footprint.  The apple has a bite out of it because I choose to use sustainability.  

The motto of my logo is - Never had a taste of sustainability?  Take a bite!