In November last year we received the exciting news that part of the school is to receive a “TREEmendous” makeover, thanks to Mazda NZ and Project Crimson awarding us a $10,000 TREEmendous event to create an outdoor learning area. Stanhope Road School is one of four New Zealand schools selected for the 2020 TREEmendous School programme. For more information about TREEmendous head to http://treemendous.org.nz/ Our TREEmendous area was designed by year 7 and 8 student members of the Eco-Warriors group. They imagined an area filled with native plants to create habitat and food for native birds, lizards, and insects, as well as a wildflower meadow for our bees, a vegetable garden and some fruit trees. There is also a water wheel that fills a tank with rainwater, timber teepees for native plants to grow over and for children to sit inside, bird houses, insect hotels and huge logs for sitting on and an outdoor blackboard for creativity and learning. On Friday the 31st of July we had a won
Puāwaitanga have been buzzing with investigations that looked at different ways we can help to ‘Make our Community GREAT!’ Take a look at what we’ve been up to. Room 16 has been looking at ways to improve our community to make it GREAT. We gathered information about organic methods to spray the weeds at our school and then we made a hypothesis before we began our testing. There were varying degrees of success, and one of the most effective ways of eradicating weeds was a mixture of vinegar, salt and water. As part of Room 17 ’s Inquiry learning this term, students were fortunate enough to spend a morning with Sarah Slater from Watercare, learning lots about water quality in our local streams and waters. Students were shown how to test the quality of water using pH and nitrate indicators, and were also able to identify how the effect of pollution can impact the water quality and animal life in our local streams. Room 18 has been using our overarching theme, ‘What