“The kit has been a real fun and engaging opportunity for my class to explore nature.
They have had so many pondering on "NOTICE THIS" around our school.
We do have a school forest and loads and loads of exploring by my class and seeing them look at nature and think sustainable methods has been mind blowing.”
“I felt that coming back lockdown it was nice to look at nature outside. I really enjoyed the moon phase section - so did my kids! My students are tracking pests over the holidays so I look forward to seeing those when we come back to school! I wonder what pests are in our own backyard!
Unfornately, my and my colleagues kowhai seeds went moudly within 2 days of planting.. either we don’t have green fingers OR something went incredibly wrong. Maybe the kids added too much water?!”
“Kit was good but no longer fit with our school wide inquiry post lockdown. Some of our seedpods also never sprouted. Kids seemed to like finding what had left tracks in the tunnel.”
“What an amazing kit, with so much learning. Our seeds have sprouted, they are with me for the holidays, growing well. We loved building our tunnel tracks, interesting find with some animal eaten through the cardboard. We found mainly snail trails. The moon stages tied in nicely with Matariki. The poem made all students successful poets. We created our own nature spaces journals so students had room to keep their work, with added extras in the envelopes or doing leave rubbings to look at different leaves. The nature taster really fitted well with our mindfulness programme where our senses have been useful. JUST LOVED THIS KIT. Thank you.”
“Thanks very much for providing us with another excellent resource. My class and I enjoyed loads of the activities and are now all experts in scarification. I have brought the seedlings home for the holidays and proudly show any visitors our work.”
“Another AMAZING kit!! We have not finished yet so will continue working through the tasks next term too! My class loved creating their own nature journal and spending time sketching different places in our school. We spent time learning about Kōwhai and were lucky to have one of our teacher aides share her knowledge before planting our seeds. So far 15 our our seeds have sprouted and I will have very excited students next week once school is back.
Thank you again!”
“Thanks so much for this kit! We have incorporated our depth and complexity learning with this and are looking at it with this lens as we teach it. We’ve done heaps on NZ forests and kowhai seeds, greenhouses and even linked constellations with Matariki. Awesome!”
“We used the last 7 weeks of term 2 (in Class) to explore all the things in the Kit. We mapped our area, found our coordinates, took samples, set tracking sheets and even made predator traps. We carefully planted our seedlings following the instructions to the letter, and kept them warm and watered. 30 students in my room (Totara) buddied up with the New Entrant class (Kowhai) to plant the seeds and now 6 weeks later not one has sprouted. I have dug around in a few of the little pots but no seeds have germinated. This was a huge disappointment for the students. I did try to source some kowhai seedlings during the first week of the holidays so I could ʻsurpriseʻ my class next term but they are too expensive.”
