WE are a SILver Enviroschool

Environmental Education

The last few weeks at WIS we have been weeding the tree planting by the Waiarohia Stream, and mapping out all the different food, fruit trees and native trees we have at in our school.

We are hoping to make some very nice looking artistic planting maps!

Students can choose to join an enrichment group which take place on a Friday. As an Enviroschool we follow a student centered approach to environmental education where students lead the inquiry of learning.

They choose an area they are interested in or identify a need in our school. From there students identify alternatives, take action and then reflect on their progress.

​Some examples of this learning in action would be the building of our shade house which is used for the propagation of native seeds, or 'Operation Shred It" where our excess paper is shredded and composted rather than recycled (saving on carbon emissions!).

The Eco Warriors group has worked hard over many Fridays building the plastic bottle brick bench (PBBB). The Eco Warriors group only gets a small amount of time each week to help the environment, but our group is very efficient and we started making the bench in late Term 1.

A plastic bottle brick is a plastic bottle filled to the top with rubbish that would usually go to landfill. We use special wooden sticks made by our explo-tech teacher Mr Peyton to press the rubbish in. Altogether we used between 150 to 200 plastic bottle bricks, all the rubbish was collected from around the school last year. Originally we were going to make the bench blue because of our school colour, but in the end we used red oxide to colour it.

​Overall this build was very successful, we got rid of a lot of rubbish and made a bench for the W.I.S students to sit on.

Native Seed Identification Trip in the bush

Students wanted to learn what some native seeds looked like, so we could know for future collections, for propagation in our shadehouse.

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We are trying to get more fruit trees growing in our grounds so students and eventually families/whanau can eat the fruit.

Each class helped to plant a tree which will be cared for and grow to help future generations.