Last Thursday, our students who care for the Living Room were our representatives at the annual Waikato Enviroschools celebration at Mystery Creek, Hamilton along with 300 other passionate environmental students.  This year's theme was 'Global Issues, Local realities'.  In our presentation, our global issue was the decline of honeybees and the impact this has on our natural and food producing environments.  Our students worked for over a term to develop their presentation. We started with an iMovie that introduced our issue, followed by our factual information presented in three different ways, including a display in two different mediums and an iPad Puppet Pal.  At the conclusion of our presentation, we had a fun honeybee quiz with a prize.  We had a fantastic day together with our parent helpers, and other enthusiastic schools who we learnt a lot from too.

A lot of great things have been happening in the Living Room backyard garden.  We have completed the first stage of the outdoor oven with community help, we have a new beehive thanks to our supportive local beekeepers and we continue to care for, eat and cook from our gardens.

Twice this year we have been the lucky benefactors of Fonterra staff’s hard work in our gully, as they worked on the steepest and weediest section of our gully restoration project. They gave their time and energy as part of the Volunteer Waikato Programme, working with gusto, determination and with a sense of fun as they weeded, collecting rubbish and planted native trees; making a significant difference in our gully.  It was great that the second team could see the area the first team had worked on and that they were able to plant in this area and that our students saw in action people giving without receiving.  We are very grateful to Fonterra for their commitment to our project and to the importance of volunteering.

The Backyard Garden Group have been fundraising to buy a new wheelbarrow.  They made pickle and chutney using ingredients from their school gardens and sold the pickle to our community. They raised enough money to get a wheelbarrow that is easily used by students.  With our expanding gardens, this will be very helpful.

Great news!  Today, the 15 September 2015 we spotted our first tui in our Cultural Gardens by the classrooms.  The tui was busy sipping nectar from the kowhai tree.  We have seen tui in our school gully but this is the first time we have seen them in the school grounds by our classrooms.  The kowhai tree has been in this garden for a long time, so the reason we are seeing one now is probably because there is enough food for them to travel along the native tree corridors of our river and gully systems.  This was very exciting.