EnviroFund Report August 2008

Our Environmental Education vision is to further educate the school, parish and community about the importance of sustainability through the ongoing development of the sustainable garden. The students are learning the necessary skills and knowledge to run the sustainable garden on an ongoing basis.

Our successful application for the further enhancement of our sustainable garden has provided the funding to enable our students to gain practical skills and knowledge in achieving our goal of having the students are running the sustainable garden. The sustainable garden is the cornerstone of our Enviroschools and recycling programme. The Envirofund funding has enabled us to solve the problems that our garden has created and finish the plans established by the original group of students who designed the garden.

The shed was finished in term one and provided a lot of learning and building experience for the children involved. Our property manager and the students finished the roofing with recycled materials from a building project that was taking place at school. We now have a place to store the worm juice from the worm farms and a complete set of garden tools to use in the garden, this has made our property manager very happy as we aren't borrowing his tools anymore.

We have purchased the egg incubator and brooder and have this scheduled to start in term three of this year. After discussion with the teachers in the Year 5/6 area it has been agreed the best time to hatch the chickens was to integrate them into the learning experience of our Sexuality Education unit. We have made contact with a lady who provides fertile eggs from "Chickens out West" who will take any extra chickens or roosters back that we hatch. The care and welfare of our chickens over the weekends will be taken care of by our automatic feeding and watering systems we purchased and in holidays they will be taken care of by one of our staff members taking them home to holiday with their chickens.

We are continuing to make the sustainable garden system work well and are continuing to provide the students in our school with the opportunity to learn about the concept of urban sustainability in a meaningful context.

Thank you to the Hamilton City Council Envirofund for giving us the opportunity to do this and help them work towards the Hamilton Community Plan and Agenda 21.