Year 3/4 - Butterfly Sustainable Elective

The Year 3/4 students in the Sustainable Elective during Term 1/2 have been learning all about native and endemic butterflies in New Zealand.  They have gained in-depth knowledge and understanding about the features of butterflies, scientific classifications, how butterflies help the environment and how people can help butterflies.  The students investigated our school Butterfly Garden that was researched and made in 2011 by students in Year 3.  The idea was from our school's vision map and was originally a New Entrant classes' idea.
Our butterfly garden has continued to attract a lot of monarch butterflies that the students enjoyed watching their lifecycle evolve but they also wanted to attract other native and endemic butterflies.  The students took eight actions during the final weeks of their study.  These actions included, a water container, more rocks to rest on and dry their wings while blood pumped through them, trap wasps, put egg shells down to stop snails and slugs eating the plants, add information signs, keep the garden trimmed and set up a roster to look after the garden.
We were all proud of our achievements, knowing we are looking after an environmental feature of our school that is important and will continue to be important in the future.

Over the past two years we have been very fortunate to have the support of Hamilton Organic in our Backyard Garden projects.  They have supplied us with large amounts of compost that we used in all our gardens and we believe this compost contributed to us being the winning school in the Hamilton City Council's pumpkin competition.  Hamilton Organic also provided us with pea straw which we used over the summer holidays to minimise weed growth and further enrich our soil.  From this preparation, we are able to offer our students rich experiences in 'garden to table' cooking and essential life skills.  We thank Hamilton Organic for their support and our other dedicated supporters.  We encourage our community to participate in Hamilton Organic's loyalty programme.

The students below are making vegetarian couscous using a range of ingredients from their school garden.

to participate in Hamilton Organics loyalty programme.

On Friday 20 May our school was once again very lucky to receive and award from Mr Graham Kitto from Fairfield Rotary Club at our school assembly. This is our fifth year of receiving this special award and we are very grateful for the support.  Our award this year was for developing our pizza/outdoor oven so that we can grow food in our gardens and cook in our outdoor oven.  We were also lucky to receive a cheque for $200 that will go towards the next stage of our outdoor kitchen planning.  The students in the Backyard Garden Group were thrilled with our award.  We believe it is important to work together in our local communities and we encourage our community to support Fairfield Rotary Club's annual book fair too.

The Year 5/6 lunchtime Backyard Garden Group have been very busy over the past few weeks, preparing new gardens for winter planting, storing wood for the outdoor oven, tidying older gardens, dismantling an older garden and sowing grass seed over the bare soil left from and older garden.  They all show great commitment, enthusiasm and teamwork.

The students in our Year 5/6 Sustainable Elective have have a very busy and fun time exploring the theme 'Healthy Living from our Backyard'.  We have had three weeks in this study so far.  Some of the activities the students have been actively involved in include a treasure hunt inside and outside of our environmental classroom, the Living Room.  This activity was designed to spark students interest in the sustainable features of the Living Room and how they connect the inside area to the outside area.  From this activity, they created a bird's eye team view of the Living Room and surrounding area.
This activity also generated a list of questions that the students wanted to know more about.  One of the question was related to learning about honey bees and the important role they play in pollination.  We then harvested honey from our school hive.  Some of this honey will be used in our cooking.
Cooking will be a part of our elective.  We talked about hygiene and the need for accurate measuring of ingredients.  So we had a measurement practise before we made our delicious Peach Smoothies, served with home grown watermelon.