“Our Year 7 students enjoyed planning and putting into action their plans to help enhance our school and local community. They collaboratively picked up litter, weeded and the mulched the grounds and gardens in and around our school with the help of the local council and parents. Thanks Schoolkit for another awesome project!”
“This was a really memorable part of our year. The kids voted on providing a meal for those in need and tapped into a really great initiative that was already set up in our community at the Linden Social Centre, their Kai Kitchen. Students made a meal, set tables, made placemats and table decorations, put together a music performance for background ambiance while people ate, and served about 40 members of their community lunch for that day. The kit provided a structure which enabled the day to run smoothly and provided students with important roles which utilised their strengths. The kids enjoyed their day and took away some really important messages.”
“AWESOME School Kit - you have done it again! What an incredible journey. Students walked to the local shops, completed a scavenger hunt, had fish and chips on the beach, a beach clean up and lastly met with D.O.C. to discuss ways that we could help the community. After brainstorming and creating a collaborative google map they decided that a weta hotel could help - so this is what we did! Students researched types of hotels/ contacted the local kindergarten/ D.O.C..... so much learning took place during this process. It was great to see students working on a collaborative task that could make a difference to their environment. Students created a brochure for The Department of Conservation, gifted weta hotels to the Kindergarten, Deep Creek Reserve, Awakau Wetland and our school. Students also put tracking tunnels down at school, to see what was coming into our area and possum monitors. This week students will be presenting their information to the school. Thanks heaps!”
“This was an awesome way of making the students aware of the little blue fish around our city and why they are needed and to then personalise their neighbourhoods by putting one on their own street,”
“This was a great kit. As we are not near a sea, we went and completed their service at the hawarden domain. They picked up rubbish and sorted it for recycling. Also filled in the holes in the ground after a horse event. Sorry we had a photographer appointed and they accidentally lost all the photos. Next time we will be aware. Thank you so much for supplying the kit.”
“Prebbleton School Intermediate Hub Manu 3 Projects
The project took some time to set up and was engaging for the whole class but voting on one project that inspired the class was the challenge. In the end, with support from our management, we decided on two areas within the Intergenerational Zone. One project was a gardening project for the elderly in our community - helping out with some weeding and lawn mowing. Flyers were placed around the neighbourhood offering our services and people contacted us to book a time for our group of students to go to their house to do some light supervised gardening. Our second project was a knitting one - we had a student’s grandparent come into the classroom to teach some students how to knit a simple Peggy Squares. We started to gather wool and needles from our community and began our task. The idea was to knit a few Peggy Squares to make a baby’s blanket for the neo-natal unit at Christchurch Hospital.
Term 4 has limited the time available to complete some of the projects but the skills and routines developed were very beneficial. The idea and the concept of volunteering, not just fundraising, was vital with this learning experience. The whole idea of connecting to the community and raising the awareness of how we can help others was important.
Quotes from a student;
“I think it was really fun I really enjoyed it and I think it was a great way to get out in the community.””
“The kit was good. It has the appropriate equipment and tools to engage the students in our gardening project. It was really good that it had a variety of roles that kids could choose from. Overall I would recommend this kit to anyone who is doing some sort of project in their own school or community.”
“I have a couple of ākonga in my class who are really community-minded, and they entered this project with vigour and enthusiasm that was catching! We decided to tackle the issue of rubbish getting into our school drains, and into our community drains. It lead to some amazing discussion about the perils of pollution in our waterways. We looked at ways to prevent litter entering the drains, but it became apparent pretty quickly that we needed to educate our kura and community. A really worthwhile learning programme.”
