Local education providers take part in town-wide Greening Taupō Celebrations
We were completely blown away by the support that we received for our Greening Taupō celebrations leading up to June 4th (Greening Taupō Day). 25 schools and ECE centres held 'Dress in Green Days', fundraised for Greening Taupō, connected with nature, and took on environmental initiatives! The photos and videos that were sent in to us brought tears to our eyes. It was so awesome to see the fantastic environmental activities that were happening all over Taupō that week.
Our judges from Contact Energy and MITRE 10 had an incredibly difficult decision due to the amazing effort that all 25 of the schools and ECE centres put in.
1st Place: Taupō Intermediate School
$1000 restoration prize from Contact Energy goes to Taupō Intermediate School for their student-led commitment to their Greening Taupō week. The judges from Contact Energy and Mitre 10 MEGA Taupo were impressed with the fact that during the week of the competition they had 4 classes work on weeding and cleaning up their native bush area, the enviro team students led a green technology day (getting all technology teachers to run special environmental activities including nature art, boomerang bag making, and planting), they put up a shade house that was donated by a rest home resident who was a customer of their 'worm tea,' they bused 3 classes of tamariki to help out at our Arbor Day planting and they raised over $700 for Greening Taupo and Kids Greening Taupo! What an awesome effort!
2nd Place: Waipahihi Primary School
$500 worth of goods from Mitre 10 MEGA Taupo goes to Waipahihi School who took on an entire week of nature connection, exploration, play and restoration!
From Monday to Friday, students got involved with:
Nature Art
Nature games/quizzes
Nature Connectors and Online Nature Classroom activities
Weeding in He Manu Whenua- the school restoration site
Bush school activities in Waipahihi Gully: students could make huts, make an obstacle course, design nature art/patterns with leaves, take part in a photography competition (birds eye view, bug’s eye view), do scavenger hunts/challenges- make a bunk bed for a ladybird, an umbrella for a frog, a new home for a snail etc, create in nature- critters, make the longest pinecone snake, make your name out of nature.
Restoration Planting
Nature themed story time
Themed dress up days and fundraising
3rd Place: Upper Atiamuri School
$200 worth of goods from Mitre 10 MEGA Taupo goes to Upper Atiamuri School who built and set traps for rats and stoats, planted and looked after their vege gardens, tidied and explored the gully and tended to the young trees. The students wore green, had green cupcakes after their mahi and collected House Points!
Highly Commended: Hinemoa Kindergarten
A bundle of native plants goes to Hinemoa Kindergarten for the amazing range of activities that they took on in their ngahere for their Greening Taupō Day.
Congratulations to all our winners!
Also, a big thanks to the sponsors/judges- Contact Energy and MITRE 10, and of course to all of those schools and ECE centres who took part. You were all amazing and we truly were blown away by the support that we received and the fantastic environmental projects that you all took on.
Let’s celebrate the efforts of all of the 25 schools and ECE centres!
Abacus Best Start:
To celebrate Greening Taupō week, Abacus Best Start held a range of nature themed activities throughout the week.
These included:
Planting
Learning about pests, making tracking tunnels and being pest detectives
Learning about bees and honey
Making playdough animals
Colouring nature pictures
Dressing in green and raising funds
Best Start Motutaiko
At Best Start Motutaiko Street we:
Had a dress up in green day!
We tidied up our car park and street
Planted some plants in our garden
Weeded all throughout the centre
Children's Corner
Thank you Kids Greening Taupo and Greening Taupo for putting on this amazing day for our Tamariki to attend. We all had lots of fun at the planting and took lots of great photos showing all the fun we had!
Country Kidz
At Country Kidz we:
Made our own Kids Greening tees and capes to raise awareness to our whānau that even our little people can be "Teenie Greenie" super heroes
Participated in the Greening Taupō Day planting
Planted our totara tree donated to us by Kids Greening Taupō
Had a play ‘picnic’ of crunchie leaves and worm tea
Added worms to the worm farm
Did regular checking of our tracking tunnels
Pushed our Eco-fundraiser which was about reducing single use plastic in our lunchboxes
Collected leaves so our babies could experience a bit more of nature by rolling and walking through the piles
Hilltop School
What an amazing turnout! Hilltop School loved participating in the wonderful opportunity that was Greening Taupō Day. We know that the money raised will go to a good cause, making Taupō greener. We had an amazing time and absolutely loved the activities we found on the Kid’s Greening Taupō website and appreciate the prizes we received.
Hilltop School participated with enthusiasm and set up class wide activities:
Our amazing enclosure was built to protect our precious Totara Tree.
Our school planted not only our native totara but also three kowhai trees. Thanks to Environmental Contracting and Greening Taupō for our awesome trees!
School wide colouring competition!
We dressed in green and raised $580 for Greening Taupō and Kids Greening Taupō!
Activities: Scavenger hunts, colouring and Kids Greening Taupō Nature Connectors!
Hinemoa Kindergarten
At Hinemoa kindergarten we spent lots of time up in our ngahere celebrating Greening Taupō!
During the week we got involved with:
Tracking and Trapping
Planting
Doing Nature Scavenger Hunts
Bug Hunting
Creating Nature Artworks
Playing, exploring, and observing
Dressing in green (and raising funds)
We even decorated our centre in green!
Lake Taupō Christian School
As part of Greening Taupō celebrations our students did a great job of cleaning up rubbish from around Crown Park. We were all surprised at just how much rubbish there was! This was all part of looking after this awesome place that we have been blessed with. Our green themed mufti day raised $140 for Greening Taupō and Kids Greening Taupō.
Laughton Kindergarten
Here at Laughton we have been busy this week decorating the Kindergarten green. We have been painting, leaf rubbing, threading leaves and drawing all sorts of greenery to add to the Kindergarten. We have been out in our reserve, mulching, watering and caring for our existing fruit trees, we also planted 6 new ones. Our children have really loved re-connecting with their local whenua, and being the kaitiaki of these trees. On Friday a group of our children and their whānau attended the Greening Taupō day and had a blast.
A big thank you to Kids Greening Taupō for our wonderful prizes!
Mountview School
Here at Mountview School, we supported Greening Taupō’s Arbor day by sending a group of students along to the Arbor Day planting event (Greening Taupō Day). We went a step further and also had a schoolwide green day and participated in a range of activities in our local environment. The activities included the Greening Taupō planting day, litter pick-ups around the streets and Spa park, and creating art using materials from the environment. We celebrated our best dressed in green winners, had food stalls and spent the afternoon working on our school gardens. We were lucky enough to get heaps of whānau support to work on planting our new nature garden which is starting to take shape, after a year of student led planning. It's looking amazing!
My Treehut
My Treehut Goes Green!
Last week (Wednesday the 2nd of June) we took part in the ‘paint the town green’ week by having our own ‘Green Day’ to promote Greening Taupō and Kids Greening Taupō, as well as championing the outdoors. All staff and tamariki came dressed in green and took part in nature activities as follows:
To begin the morning we started by bringing everyone outside. Here we had green water for the water play trough, and a small planting ceremony of the beautiful kānuka that Kids Greening Taupō gave us.
Once this was done we went out into our carpark where we started a bonfire, built bivvies, weeded, bug hunted and even used the chalk that one of our kaiako had made.
To feed our hungry bellies from all of the fun, in the afternoon we also decided to cook our afternoon tea on the bonfire. This ended up being banana with melted chocolate filling and green veggies to balance it all out. Our wonderful Lynda also baked us an amazing ‘Greening Taupō’ cake!
On Friday we took a group of tamariki to the Greening Taupō Day planting event. They had lots of fun planting trees and taking part in the activities.
Thank you very much for allowing us to be a part of your amazing week - My Treehut thoroughly enjoyed it and we absolutely loved getting outdoors and having heaps of fun!
Northwood Kindergarten
During Greening Taupō week our tamariki enjoyed getting outdoors to connect to nature and explore. Unfortunately we were having so much fun that we forgot to snap any photos of these activities! The photos below capture us in our element, displaying our tuakana-teina relationship with St Patrick’s School students when connecting to our local gully- Brentwood Gully. We also raised nearly $50 for Greening Taupō and Kids Greening Taupō!
Playcentre
For our Greening Taupō celebrations we:
Printing some Kids Greening Taupō scavenger hunts and went exploring
Planted some native trees- 1 Totara, 2 Horoeka, Several Hebe, Several Kōwhai
Made a big pile of leaves to play in and explore
Learned about a basket fungus (that was discovered the week before)
Encouraged people to wear green and make a gold coin donation ~ $67 was taken over the week.
St Patrick's School
St Patrick's school loved being a part of the Greening Taupō, Paint the Town Green event. All classes did different things, some tidying up our bush walk, some out doing a Greening Taupō native scavenger hunts and others weeding our school gardens. Four classes also headed down to the Brentwood gully and picked up rubbish there. The Greening Taupo 'Outdoor Classroom' website was fantastic for ideas of what the teachers could do
Stepping Stones
We've had so much fun 'Painting the Town Green' for Greening Taupō Day at playgroup today. Thank you Educarer Laura for painting our faces green and look at all of the planting we've done in our garden box! We also drew pictures of things that live outside in the trees like butterflies, caterpillars and t-rex's!
Tauhara College
As part of our Greening Taupō celebrations we sent two classes along to the Greening Taupō Day planting preparation day on June 3rd. Students were able to learn about the vision of Project Tongariro, Greening Taupō, and Kids Greening Taupō, as well as learn native plant identification, and help lay out the plants for the planting the next day.
On June 4th our students dressed in green and raised funds for the organisations, as well as taking part in a range of nature-based activities which were all planned by student Katherine Davy. Some classes took part in a Tauhara College specific Nature Scavenger Hunt, others did nature art and nature connection based activities. Four classes were able to attend the Greening Taupō Day planting- helping plant some of the 4000 native trees between AC Baths and the Taupō Golf Course.
See HERE Katherine Davy’s planning which was sent out to all Year 9 and 10 teachers in preparation for the celebrations.
Tauhara Primary
We have enjoyed celebrating and raising money for Kids Greening Taupō. On our Green Day we raised $180- this money will go directly to Kids Greening Taupō to help pay for native planting/ maintenance around our district. It will also help fund some amazing school activities. Thankyou all so much for your support.
Taupō Intermediate
We had such an awesome Greening Taupo day at Taupo Intermediate. We had donations from The Warehouse and Mitre 10 Mega Taupo to help with some of the awesome workshops run by our amazing tech teachers for nominated students. These included planting, nature art, and making reusable produce bags. The planning for this day was student led. The Kids Greening Taupō Rangers and student leaders spoke at a meeting for the tech staff, convinced them to get on board, and helped them to plan activities for the day. We also finally put together a shade house that had been donated to the school last year by a resident at the neighbouring rest home. She was one of our customers for our worm ‘tea’ from our worm farm.
We raised over $700 for Greening Taupo through our Dress in Green Day.
We had 3 classes go and support with the Arbor Day Planting event at Centennial Drive.
During the week, 4 classes worked with Blue Light and Kids Greening Taupō to remove weeds from our native gully area. We have rescued the 50 year old native trees that were covered in jasmine and ivy. This week we filled up 3 trailers with these weeds to be taken to landfill. We also stacked the wood from the cherry trees that had been removed by an arborist. Altogether, this term 12 classes will spend 2 hours each weeding this gully. See the video to see what the jasmine jungle originally looked like. Our goal is to make this area an outdoor classroom, a space where we can go to learn outdoors.
It is great to see our students looking after Papatuanuku!
Taupo-nui-a-Tia College
As part of our Greening Taupō celebrations some of our students were able to help set-up for the big 4000 tree planting. We learned about native plant species, laid-out the plants near holes for the next day, and connected with the amazing volunteers from the Wicked Weeders- a group of people who come out to weed our local restoration sites every week with Robyn from Greening Taupō! Without people maintaining these restoration sites- the plants wouldn’t do nearly as well as they do currently. Our students were able to take their learnings from the preparation day, and use their new knowledge in their subjects at school- an excellent authentic context which connects into their current trapping unit at Motutahae!
Taupo Primary
As part of our Greening Taupō celebrations we:
Held a small planting on our ‘back field’
Attended the big 4000 tree planting on June 4th
Dressed in green and raised over $400
Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Whakarewa I Te Reo Ki Tuwharetoa
Our rangatahi attended the 4th June Greening Taupō day planting to put lots of plants into the whenua. We enjoyed getting stuck into the planting, connecting with the whenua, taking part in the environmental activities on site, and the kai which included soup from The Bistro, bread rolls from Pak’n Save Taupō, and a sausage sizzle thanks to Trev Terry Marine!
Tirohanga school
Our students absolutely loved getting involved with the Greening Taupō Day planting and activities! Ngā mihi nui Greening Taupō and Kids Greening Taupō, along with all of the Taupō Environmental Education Collaborative members who had stalls/activities on the day.
Upper Atiamuri school
Our Great Greening Day was a huge success, thank you to everyone for the support. We have built and set traps for rats and stoats, planted and looked after the vege gardens, tidied and explored the gully and tended to the young trees. Leaves are raked and cleared away - all while wearing green, eating green cupcakes and collecting House Points!
Waipahihi Kindergarten
At Waipahihi Kindergarten we dressed up in green, raised some funds for Greening Taupō and Kids Greening Taupō, and took our tamariki down to the ngahere at Waipahihi Gully. Unfortunately, we didn’t take any photos as we were having a blast in the moment- here are some photos of our bush kindergarten adventures the week after. Our tamariki found a fresh dead possum in Waipahihi Gully. It was a great opportunity for Sian to guide the students through a closer look. The tamariki were able to ask questions and make theories about why the Possum may have died, while talking about care and respect for all critters. They observed all of the different parts that make possums fantastic climbers and omnivorous predators, and then some of the impacts that these introduced species can have on Aotearoa's taonga species, and why we trap/poison them (humanely). Yet another fantastic natural learning opportunity out in the ngahere!
Waipahihi Primary
Pre Green Week- Totara planting ceremony to celebrate Waipahihi’s 60 years.
Green week-
Monday: Students dressed up as their favourite animal and talked about their habitats
Tuesday: Students learned how to draw native animals and plants, then headed out to the shade area to create their own chalk masterpieces. In Class, the board game area was nature themed and included a Kahoot on native birds and a DOC quiz.
Wednesday: Classes involved in weeding He Manu Whenua- the school restoration area.
Thursday: Green dress up day, parade, kōrero about Kids Greening Taupō, bush school and Nature Connectors at School.
Bush school stations:
Station 1: Play in nature - make huts, make an obstacle course,
Station 2: Find in nature - design nature art/patterns with leaves, photography (birds eye view, bug’s eye view), scavenger hunt (can you make bunk beds for a ladybird, an umbrella for a frog, a new home for a snail etc)
Station 3: Create in nature critters, the longest pinecone snake, make your name out of nature.
Nature Connectors at School:
Nature Connectors
Scavenger hunt set up around the school
Weeding
‘Aroha Knows’ storytime
Friday: Teacher only day, whānau involvement with KGT planting day and activities promoted.
Wairakei Primary School
We celebrated our annual 'Tree for Every Child' planting day on Thursday June 3, 2021. Despite the cold, foggy weather, our Enviro students and Kids Greening Taupō Rangers got stuck in and helped our new students plant their trees around the school. Every year, any children who are new to the school plant a native tree on the school grounds. This year we were lucky to have Alex from Enviroschools come along to help us out.
We also celebrated this with a ‘wear green’ day. Our themed mufti days are always very popular and this was no exception.
A highlight for me was being shown the lunchbox of one of our new entrant students, Zoey - her lunch was all green. That was true dedication from home.
We raised $338 towards Kids Greening Taupo to help them to continue the great work they do around our local environment.
