Enviro - Sustainability Learning
greengoldenviroschool2021.MOVIn May 2021 we took part in our Enviro School Green Gold Reflection. Watch the video to hear the outcome!
You can find out about Enviro Schools in Aotearoa here...
An Introduction to Enviro at OPS.
Onehunga Primary School started the Environmental journey nearly ten years back. We achieved the Green Gold status because we have woven the guiding principles and practices throughout the school’s living growing VISION. The children learn to respect all living and non-living things in our school.
Our practices are sustainable and these practices help our learning for life. The students feel empowered, happy and in charge of a lot of things.
Our school has happy children who support each other by perseverance and showing respect to Tikanga Maori (nga tangata whenua, the people of the land).
Composting Investigation - 2023
3/8/23
At OPS we have lots of worm farms which use our waste food scraps and some of our paper. Our ‘Enviro Team of ākonga look after these.
A group of ākonga from all Learning Communities (who we now call our OPS Composting Group) has started to work on a new sustainability project. They talked about all of the brown leaves which fall from trees around the school and wanted to find a way to use them.
After some research at home ākonga from the group came back with ideas to share about composting the leaves. This is a great way to use the leaves and it makes compost for our new vege gardens!
Miriama found us this video which helped us learn more about making compost.
Bonnie summarised the recipe for compost from the video as “Green things, brown things and already made compost”
Brown things are leaves, hay, shredded paper and brown paper
Green things are grass clippings, weed, fruit and vege scraps
We use 1-2 bags of green to 6-8 bags of brown things.
We made an application to ‘EcoMatters’ Love Your Neighbourhood’ for money to buy some compost bins to get started.
We have decided to try a couple of different bins for composting and we will keep notes of how they work. Eventually we want to use what we find out to plan more composting for our school.
We will update you as this project progresses.
Our next step is to start collecting the ‘brown things’ from around the school.
Thanks to EcoMatters’ Love Your Neighbourhood - Maungakiekie- Tāmaki Local Board for funding to start our composting investigation.
Trash To Fashion at our OPS Arts and Cultural Festival - 2023
Every two years we have an OPS Arts and Cultural Festival.
The festival is held on a Saturday afternoon and we have a huge number of freiends nad whānau come along to watch our ākonga perform. It's an amazing community event.
Every child in our school takes part in some way. Some perform, and some create art works which are shared on the day.
One of the options was a 'Trash To Fashion' group. This group worked over the weeks to re-use rubbish to make awesome outfits which the modelled on the day of the festival.
Leaf Hunters - 2024
The Great Leaf Hunt - Term 2 2024
We are lucky to have beautiful established trees in our school, which provide us with shelter and shade over summer. This year we are working to collect and use the large amount of leaves which drop in autumn. There are a lot!
On Wednesdays we have a very enthusiastic group of ākonga who take part in leaf collection. We weigh the collection and find which team has collected the most that day. One week we focused on the turf courts area only and filled all of our bags!
The collected leaves are used for our compost and what we can't use is shared with Royal Oak Intermediate for their composting system.
We decided that we had too many leaves for our exisiting compost bins and have created a huge pile behind Room 20 which we have covered. We are looking forward to using the leaf compost which the leaves turn in to in our productive gardens next year.
Mana Ora Murals
In March this year Sophie , Alex and Macy, went to a meeting with Auckland Council, other school groups and supporting environmental agencies.
They wanted schools to have a say in ways we can reduce our carbon footprint and to empower students to make changes within their community.
Macy, Sophie and Alex came up with some ideas of ways we could do this at our school, and shared them with the other participants of the meeting.
Over the next few weeks they worked with a group of interested students (now called the Mana Ora team) and refined their ideas.
They came up with a plan to create 5 murals encompassing the 5 target areas for reducing our carbon footprint - Litter, Growth, Energy, Food and Transport.
We priced up the cost for the murals and applied for the grant. This was given to our students on the strength that they wanted to involve the whole school in the planning for the murals by allocating each team an area to consider and share ideas on.
They kick started with an assembly asking for teams to share their ideas in the form of drawings on their given topic.
We utilised the talents of Ms Graham who took on board everyones ideas and created the drawings that formed the base of the murals. Eight students from each team were chosen to work on the murals under the guidance of Ms Graham and Mrs Arthur.
We have learned so much from the development of these murals. Thank you so much Auckland council and sponsors for the opportunity to create these murals. We hope they will be a catalyst for conversation about ways to reduce our carbon footprint, and be a resource for years to come.
Mini Fairs
Mini Fairs are a bit of an OPS institution. They have existed for years and provide a great sustainability function for our school and community.
Our Term 3 Mini Fair 2024
We had a second Mini Fair for the year, thanks to the mahi of Friends of the School (FOTS). Mini Fairs are awesome for our school in a number of ways, a lot of fun which brings our community together, a fundraiser, learning for ākonga about money and spending, a chance for our sustainability enviro groups to sell items, and they provide a great sustainable way to reuse pre-loved toys and books.
Thank you to the team behind making it happen and for those of you who supported it with donations, baking and purchasing.
This Mini Fair made over $3,000.00!
