“Room 5 at Beaconsfield loved this awesome kit - favourites were definitely reviewing the tracking tunnels, looking at the marks on the chew cards, ph testing and getting to know individual trees really well! We were amazed by the interconnectedness of nature and learnt a great deal about the moon too! We are waiting for warmer weather to plant our seeds and are looking forward to watching them grow. A great kit - thank you!!”
“Thanks for another great kit. My class enjoyed engaging with our chosen 'nature space', which led to further learning activities relating to our school environment. We really liked the kowhai seedling task, much learning stemmed from this. Once again I liked the way that the unit was outlined- with links etc that made it easy for me to access and understand. Thanks!”
“L3 thoroughly enjoyed getting to know our Nature Spot from many different angles. Our highlights were making tracking tunnels, chew cards and planting our Kowhai seeds. We are still waiting patiently for a shoot to break through We loved testing the ph of our samples and took it further by testing everything and anything all the way back to class. Thank you SchoolKit and Doc for creating excitement and giving us fun learning experiences this term. We are looking forward to the water testing kit next term”
“We have done the photographic assignment "Notice Me" where students took photos of nature around the school and prepared slide shows, identified native plants species using inaturalist website;
We also looked at living things- what makes something living, plants and animals. We focused on the acronym Mrs Gren to remember the necessary features and characteristics of living organisms, ie: Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion and Nutrition and students prepared a poster explaining these aspects.
Our focus turned to:
What is the difference between a plant and a tree? Looking at the kowhai tree and researching it, it's traditional uses and creating our our paper version.
In term 3, we are moving onto :
Parts of plants and their functions
What is a green space?
Why are trees and plants important?
What has happened to NZ's native forests?
Green spaces, trees and ecosystems
Find out about trees in our green space. Wildlife in Mangemangeroa (a local greenspace across the road from our school) , our local ecosystem and habitats; Using microbits and coding.
This is before we get to planting the kowhai seeds- when it's a bit warmer and we will be creating our own terrariums.
So it's going to be a busy term and we have now got our term 1 school camps rescheduled and happening in this term!
Please be assured we are really enjoying the focus your Nature spaces have given us and we have adapted it to suit our learners (we are 8 classes- 4 year 7's and 4 year 8's)”
“This was a great kit as it was something very different. Students enjoyed looking at the phases of the moon and looking at the environment and the history around us. Our kowhai seeds didn’t grow too well but students enjoyed the process of planting them anyway. We had a lot of fun doing the listening poems and we all learnt something. Thanks, it was a good kit.”
“This kit has been fabulous for small groups who have been looking at the school environment with my student teacher. It has many different activities and has encouraged them to actually get out of the classroom and explore the flora that we have in the school grounds. We are going to use the kit across the school with our Enviro group once we can get this up and running again.”
