Monday 30 June 2014

Visit to St Patrick's School in Invercargill

On Wednesday the 25th of June Mrs M took 12 Envirogroup kids to visit St Partick's School in Invercargill.  The reason for the trip was to have a look at St Patrick School's prayer garden.  This is a special garden that has been made by the St Patrick's kids.  It is a space for children to go to to relax and think.  The children at St Patrick's designed the garden and had control over what the garden's features were to be.  The Gore Main School Envirogroup came away from the visit with lots of new ideas for their 'Tranquility' garden that they want to create at school.  The day was funded by Environment Southland.  They paid for the bus, the food and Mrs M's salary for the day.  Thank you Environment Southland.  Amy and Pat, representatives from Environment Southland attended the day as well.  We really had a great day and think that school interchanges are extremely worthwhile for Enviroschools.  Some of the ideas we got from the trip for our own future 'Tranquility' garden are...
:
  =The Envirogroup wants to propagate their own plants for their garden.  Why buy when you can grow plants from other ones?

=Lots of fragrant plants in the Tranquility garden.  The St Pat's garden had fragrant lavender and the plants smelt wonderful.

=The children though that colour would be great in the garden.

=Native plants for the birds to come to.

The media was in attendance on this day and we made the paper!!

Here are photos from the day!

St Pat's Prayer Garden entrance - nice bright signs

Fragrant Lavender - They smelt lovely!

The children in the Prayer garden getting to know each other

Relaxing in the Prayer garden

The Prayer garden at St Pat's had lots of lovely decorations 

Koru and kids

Beautiful, a corner of the Prayer garden.  What a relaxing space

All the St Pat's and Gore Main kids

Pat from Environment Southland and the kids mixing from both schools


Sunday 22 June 2014

Tranquility garden

Our big project for 2014 at Gore Main School is to design a 'Tranquility garden'.  Our vision is to have a space in the school that children can go and hang out in.  We would like it to be peaceful and colourful.  We want children to be surrounded by nature....

Watch this space..

Here is the area that we want to turn into a 'Tranquility garden'

Preparing the garden for winter

Our vege garden has been planted out in 'winter vegetables'.  We have harsh winters here in Gore so we need to protect our little plants with pea straw.  We also cut up old plastic milk bottles to make them into little tunnel houses!  These things will protect our vegetables and ensure that we get some good vegetables!
Here is the pea straw going on the garden for winter...

Bricks around the fruit trees

We have an orchard at Gore Main School.  To make it tidier we decided to put some bricks in the ground to create a garden feature around each fruit tree.  These bricks were donated by Robina Johnston!  Thanks Robina!  Here we are putting the bricks in around some of the trees!  Gee it was hard work, but we are not afraid of that!

You are doing a good job guys!  The bricks look great!

Making log men

The Envirogroup has been busy making 'log men'.  To make a 'log man' you get a tree log.  Then you look for old bits and bobs that are lying around.  You can recycle them by nailing them onto the log to make a character.  These look wonderful and the faces on the logs are all different.  We are very proud of our log men.  We have made a new product out of old ones!

Busy nailing on recycled stuff!





Our log men are shaping up!

We are adding hair to our log men!

Sand in the 'sandpit'

The Envirogroup decided that they wanted to add 'sand' to the Gore Main School existing sandpit.  The sand seems to disappear!  We are constantly thinking of ways that we can make Gore Main School a better place.  The group set to and unloaded a whole trailer of sand.  Thank you to Ben H for suggesting and organising this project and to the Hargest family for donating the sand.

Here we are unloading sand into the sand pit!  Well done Envirogroup!