Check out our amazing murals, painted by Michelle Rowland (a local artist, based in Stratford). Michelle took our simple vision and ideas and amplified them, creating this beautiful piece.

She incorporated so many aspects of what is important and valued to us as a learning centre.

Our maunga (mountain) who watches over us, our four manu (birds) that are significant to us as a centre. Cows and dairy farming in honour and rememberence of why our centre was first established in 1998 for  workers from the Kiwi dairy factory, now Fonterra. Our wonderful local awa (river) and the coast line that we are fortunate to live on.

Last week we celbrated Samoan language week, the Kea and Morepork children created a siapo and made masi samoa (Samoan coconut cookies). Across the centre we learnt new pese (songs), their favourites being the sasa, le aute and the colour song!
This is not the end of our Pasifika journey here at Kiwi Clubhouse! We look forward to diving in and strengthening our knowledge along side our tamariki. Keep an eye out for what we do next.

To show our support and get involved in our local A&P show our tamariki worked together to create some masterpieces to enter into the creation competitions.
The annual Scarecrow competition is one of our favourites. This year our scarecrow was constructed using recycled materials and had glasses and hands made from number 8 wire to meet this years chosen theme. Our scarecrow ended up coming in first place!

Our Tui room tamariki entered two categories, the painted rock creations where we made a beautiful collaborative butterfly. Along with entering the recycled materials creations where our tamariki made some farm animals (cow, pig, sheep and chicken) using formula tins, fabric pieces, tubes, feathers and scrap paper. Our pig, sheep and cow received a first place and our chickens second place.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to our kaiako Ellen and Kim for their hard mahi supporting our tamariki with their creations.

To check out more photos have a look in our photo gallery!

As part of our sustainability journey our tamariki have decided that they would like to replant our gardens with different fruits and vegetables that we can harvest. We approached Bunnings to ask if they would be willing to donate any seeds or plants and the response was amazing. Less than a week later Bunnings had put together a generous donation of vegetable plants including; garlic, spring onions, peas, broccoli, spinach, carrots and lettuce. 

With our vegetable gardens growing an abundance of kai we have set up a 'Community Sharing Shelf' so we can share our wonderful produce. 

We would like to sincerely thank Bunnings for their donation! 

Recently at Kiwi Clubhouse we have made a big emphasis on being a sustainable centre. After doing a rubbish audit throughout our centre we found that we were creating a lot of plastics rubbish and wondered “what can we do better to reduce our plastic waste?”

Together with our tamariki we got busy making bees wax wraps to use in lunch boxes instead of things like glad wrap. All our children received a beeswax wrap to take home and use to bring their kai in.

Check out the flyer to see what else you can use your bees wax wraps for too.

If you are enjoying using these instead of using plastics we have a some more available for you to purchase, please see one of our friendly kaiako.