“HI Team - we used the SVA Community Guardian kit to assist us in planning and implementing a native tree planting day in the area behind our school. We had 230 children take turns throughout the day to plant over 300 trees! A big thank you to Forest and Bird for donating the trees. This is a project that we have wanted to implement for while now - so it was so exciting to finally be able to do this. The kids enjoyed wearing the vests and the badges. More vests would have been awesome!
The different jobs might have been a tad above us - (Year 3/4) so we modified them slightly.
Sorry not sure how to add photos - though we have a heap of them!
Thanks so much.”
“This was a wonderful day where the year 8 students chose to clean the park SYlvan park. When we walked in we thought there was nothing to clear but having divided the park into grids it wasn't long before broken surf boards hidden in bushes and old tyres were found and brought to the ever growing pile by the collection point. It was wonderful with Auckland city council also coming up with help by arranging disposal of the objects and coming down to speak to the group before we started. This rounded off a year of eco focused curriculum including an eco fashion show based on upcycling and also a christmas market with zero waste policy. Thanks for the pack the students had a great time planning and executing their plan. The main feedback was that in a park where it looked tidy and well kept if you start looking a huge pile of rubbish can still be found and ";how can people do this hiding things in the bush? - its disgusting. Students are far more aware and community minded as a result of this task. Thank you for a fantastic kit.”
“We had a fantastic time with this kit. Christmas is the perfect time for our school to do some community outreach and SVA fitted in perfectly. We had students out and about on our Day of Action. They visited retirement villages and played petanque, sang songs and exercised with the residents. They visited the early childhood centre next door and sang Christmas carols. They baked cupcakes for our police and fire fighters and delivered them as well as making and delivering Christmas cards to small businesses in our community. Thanks SVA. It was a great day and the students were thoroughly engaged in the planning and implementing of the action.”
“What a fantastic kit! Our tamariki were highly engaged in brainstorming ways to help our community. The kit provided some excellent resources to support their thinking and made the learning tangible. By outlining a range of roles in the kit, students could successfully analyse the benefit of delegating certain jobs to different people. This kit effectively supported students' understanding of the community and how the can be active participants.”
“My Year 3 class completed the SVA Kit this year. They absolutely loved doing it, and were so engaged from the beginning of the process. The kit gave us a great opportunity to talk about our local community and figure out what some of our local needs are. The kids were really keen to help some people in our community, and ended up deciding to make stationery kits to donate to those in need. They ran most of the process and wrote letters to local businesses, put together notices and posters to appeal to our school community, and of course made a wee assembly line to put the packs together! We were able to tie this into our math sessions to decide how much of everything we would need, and how much we could buy within a certain budget. The class was so excited when a Red Cross volunteer stopped into our class to collect the kits we made and talked to us about the refugee children who would be receiving them. This has made my students so much more aware of the wider world around the and they have been asking very interesting questions about the needs of others in our community. We loved this kit, and I would definitely do it again!”
