Caring for our planet

Fresh lemonade and Banana and Oat Muffins

It was a full day off mixing, chopping, mashing, stirring, squeezing, cooking and of course eating and drinking. 

After our noodles for the lunch the tamariki were still keen to get their cook on so we made some Banana and Oat muffins for afternoon tea and washed it down with some freshly squeezed lemonade made by Leo and Chloe... what a delicious day.

Vermicelli noodles

Today we had a busy day in the kitchen. We made yummy Vermicelli noodles for lunch which went down a treat. The children took great care to use the hot pan and add the different ingredients. We even used some herbs and spring onion from our garden. Yum Yum

Science with flowers

With such a great interest in the garden at the moment, this week we put some white flowers into some different coloured water to see if we could change the colour of the petal. The red one started to work within a few hours and by the end of the week the flower was very red. The yellow and green one took a few days but did slightly change the colour of the petals and the purple and blue one didn't change the colour at all and in fact made our lovely whit flowers droop and start to die. This was a great experiment that provided us the opportunity to use of predicting, observing and questioning skills. 

Planting our new plants

Today we planted our new plants in the flower garden. First we re-dug the soil so it was smooth and ready for our plants. We saw lots of worms, a couple of spiders and even a centipede! Then it was time to plant our plants. We planted a mixture of flowers (daisies, pansies and marigolds) some basil and some tomato plants, these plants were chosen by the children and  also because some of them are know to be good companion plants. We took turns at carefully digging a hole the right size for the plant that we were planting, then the plant was eased out of it's punnet and put in the hole, finally we used our hands to carefully pat the soil in around the plants to hold them in place. We hope that they will grow big and strong and produce lots of beautiful flowers for us!

Busy in the garden

Yesterday was a very busy day out in the garden as we pulled out the last of our vegetables so we can prepare our garden for our new planting. Many of the children were keen to help and there were plenty of jobs to be done. Along with preparing our worm farm we had to pull the old plants out, most of these were quite eaten by a slug friend that we found in the cabbage so we cut up the things that we couldn't eat and have put them aside as food for our worm farm. We also trimmed back the trees to keep our centre looking fresh and ready for Summer, The children were great kaitiaki of their centre as they helped to wheel barrow the loads of mess away and bundle up the greenery for composting. We also replanted our strawberries over in an area that we put a net up so our forest friends (the birds) don't come and eat them before us. We are excited to plant out new blueberry tree too! This afternoon we will be turning our garden over and will plant all of our new produce over the next two days.

Inside there was more planting going on as we planted lots and lots of sunflower seeds to grow around the centre too. We are hoping that we can have lots of beautiful big sunflowers over the coming months.
We are wondering who will grow the tallest ....The sun flowers, The beans or the corn??? Watch this space!!