Board of trustees report, Environment group.
Hi, I’m Lydia and this is Grace .We would like to talk to you about the schools environment. So far this year we have made great progress on the schools environment. We are also in the middle of some big projects.
Over part of the Christmas holidays Toni built a garden shed, Next to room 19.Since then he has also built potting shelves inside to store our many garden supplies on. Lydia and I decorated the inside with posters about endangered animals and recycling. We also put up nails to hang up tools. Then Lydia, Thomas and I designed a colorful 3d mural consisting of fruit , vegetables and garden tools to go on the shed.We have just began to paint the mural.
We realized that the bush area was being destroyed. Children were climbing and trampling all over the plants in the bush area. It was closed off to the school and the enviro group began to discuss ideas about how to make the bush area user-friendly. Toni has built a retaining wall and two sets of steps. While the bush area is closed off we took the chance to invite birds to the area. They are now enjoying weet-bix from the new bird feeder.
What we are planning to do with bush area is to paint a red line on the climbing trees where the kids have to stop climbing.Along the field side of the bush area we are going to put up a hurricane fence,Also down thr path a knee hight fence wil hopefully stop trampling on roots.we are also planning to plant more native plants in there.For Room 9’s recycling efforts over the last 12 months,we were given 12 native plants, from paper 4 trees.we have already planted these along the retaining wall.
One after noon four people came to talk to us about worms and why we worm farm. They had earlier visited Turopaki’s worm farms. They showed us pictures and also bought some worms for us to hold.
We have also been working on the vege garden, mostly weeding the area. We now have a picket protecting the area from balls. We are also growing a fejoa hedge and have planted more veges and some herbs.
The enviro group were gifted a bag of daffodil bulbs from Chris Benny . We have planted them up top and outside the office.
The small box garden outside room 15 is also a project. We spread mulch around the garden .We will probably do more development over the year.
Emma Wellington and I have set up a competition with McCains, collecting the barcodes from packets of frozen vegetables. Once we have a special amount of bar codes we can order gardening supplies such as fertiliser, seeds, gloves and wheelbarrows. At the moment we are trying to collect lots of barcodes!
We have also set up a blog about what we have been doing since the start of the year. Each time we have Enviro group we try to add a new thing to the blog. The blog includes pictures, information and some cool web site links. If you want to see the blog spot, check out: hilltopenviro.blogspot.com.
To make our garden even better, we need more potting mix and fertiliser and/also bins for storage. The fruit bank is also needing more trees. We would like to purchase these some time in the future.
Over all, we have made a lot of progress in less than two terms. If you have any questions, please ask us.
Thank you for this opportunity to talk to you about this school’s environment.
Lydia White and Grace Wilcox
Hilltop School Enviro group.