Kaponga Primary School pupils busy weeding the community garden. Photo / Alyssa Smith
Kaponga Primary School pupils busy weeding the community garden. Photo / Alyssa Smith
Kaponga Primary School senior pupils are giving their Fridays a green thumbs-up.
On Friday mornings Year 3-8 pupils swap their pens and paper for paintbrushes and garden utensils. The initiative, Enviro Fridays, is a way for pupils to get hands-on learning experience while cleaning up the school, says principal Shane Downs.
He says the school’s attendance rate has increased since the Enviro Fridays were introduced last year.
“We found a lot of kids were skipping school on Fridays. We implemented something fun and hands-on to encourage the pupils to attend school. Percentage-wise our attendance has improved dramatically.”
The school is working on gaining its silver EnviroSchools medal, with the projects aimed at helping them achieve the milestone.
“We’re waiting to be ticked off on our bronze, but these projects will help us achieve silver status.”
From left: Adan Ashcroft (10), Dane Morresey-Pearce (8) and Jaden England (12) collecting rocks to create a mini-putt course by the creek area. Photo / Alyssa Smith
The school has five main projects: redesigning the creek area, building a chicken run, redesigning murals, creating a community garden, weeding and creating a sensory garden.
“The pupils have supervision from teachers. We’re adding a mini-putt course to our creek area and recycling our old murals to create new ones. The community garden will benefit Kaponga as a whole. The sensory garden will be a space where people can feel, listen and surround themselves in nature.”
“It instils our school values of Aroha and respect while giving the pupils something to work towards. The finished projects will be at our school for years to come. When they come back to visit the school, they’ll be able to say they had a hand in making our school look good and creating something that will be around for a while.”
He says the school set aside a budget and secured additional funding from Todd Energy for the community garden.
From left: Neveah O'Leary and Maddi Malcolm (both 12) creating garden art. Photo / Alyssa Smith
“While we can’t disclose how much they have given us, we appreciate the support we’ve received.”
Dayna Downs, teacher in charge of the community garden, says the community garden was started last year.
“We had a space that wasn’t used just outside our senior block. We put in a deck to reach that space and create the garden. We’re now planting seeds and working on garden art. The kids are contacting plumbers to help us build an irrigation system. Todd Energy gave us funding last year. They allocated more funding to be given to us each year until 2025.
Sophiia Buckthought (13) says the garden will help the wider community.
“It will be paying it forward. If someone needs something from our garden, they can repay us by helping with weeding or donating seeds. If you put kindness into the world, it has a way of coming back and helping others.”
Classmate Ella Morresey-Pearce (10) looks forward to building the bottle greenhouse.
“Colonel Malone’s Restaurant and Bar in Stratford collected coke bottles for us to use. It’s going to be a good addition to our community garden.”
It’s not just gardening the pupils are doing, but some painting as well. Olly Baillie (9) has enjoyed painting the school’s values to be displayed in the space.
“It will be a part of our garden art. It’s very special.”
Shane says while there’s still more to do, the pupils have made a good start.
“They’re keen, driven and happy to help. We have a lot of exciting things happening at our school.”
