“The DOC kit. We have started this and the students are slowly engaging in it. We had swimming lessons for the past 4 weeks daily and as we had to bus to another school it ate up most of our day so we didn't get a chances to complete this fully.
Also, the seedlings are not really doing very well. Lots of mould in their pots but no sprouts. I wonder if it is because it is so cold at the moment? We will continue this kit next term. Sorry I thought I took a photo of the plants before I let school yesterday, but I appear to have not!”
“Thank you for the Nature Spaces kit. Our whole Year 4 team enjoyed using this to look more closely at our "Bird Corridor" which is a project in progress since 2015. Each activity gave us a new perspective on the space and lead to the children creating a bug hotel and wanting to install a bird/bee bath later in the year. We loved planting up pour kowhai seeds and look forward to them being added to the bird corridor next year. Surprisingly our tracker tunnel didn't get any footprints. We'll keep monitoring this. Thanks again, Christine Daniel and Year 4 Sunnyhills School”
“Thank you for the opportunity to learn to plant kowhais, our students loved the process. The link for the mapping unfortunately did not work which was a shame as it was a wonderfully useful skill for our intermediate age students when working on other environmental projects around the school. I have found the punnets have gone mouldy even though I have stored them in a warm dry dark environment. We are looking forward to our seedlings appearing in the near future.”
“Thank you for your brilliant kit. I found the seed planting the most relevant for my students as we are developing a garden area. I would love to have more information around planting by the moon, especially planting food during different seasons. I had a problem with the mapping link not working. Thank you for your effort developing exciting learning resources.
I also had problems with the punnets developing white mould on the outside.
We are so looking forward to planting our kowhai.”
“We didn't end up using the kit as I had initially planned due to lockdown. I ended up having small groups complete this with a TA as it didn't link in with learning we were doing in T2. Some aspects of the guide were tricky to follow but the kids enjoyed planting the seeds.”
“We really enjoyed planting the seeds. It seemed like the soil pods didn't give as much soil as there was supposed to be in the pots. I found the instructions on the teacher guide quite hard to follow and a couple of the links didn’t work. Unfortunately, we haven’t had any seedlings yet but are still hoping we’ll get there! This kit was supposed to tie in with the Term 1 inquiry so unfortunately didn't tie into any learning that we've done in Term 2.”
“After looking through the resources so far I am totally excited about the planned activities & deep learning in this kit. Loving the connections to local curriculum.”
“During Home Learning I set various activities from the kit around looking closely at their own back yard, learning about observation in depth over a small area. As the Autumn colours were in full swing we used this as a basis of an art work.
Back at school we are looking at the moon and night sky aspects of the kit and plan to do more on the notice project now and in spring, when we will plant the kowhai seeds. Thank you for this kit - aspects of it I will use time and time again!”
