Week 8: Strawberries and Hanging Baskets

We only have 2 weeks left of our Rural Science class before we move to a new option class. We have been selling our herbs to the staff and are hoping to have a shared lunch with the money we have made and also donate some money to a worthy charity.

This week as part of our make our school beautiful project we set up our hanging flower baskets.
                                      

       Katie and Evelyn preparing the hanging baskets

           
Here we all are hanging up the hanging baskets in the front entrance to the school. We will take it in turns to water them and add new plants as others die off.

Our Principal Mrs Hohneck came out to see our work and talked

to us about what we had been doing.

We have also been busy setting up a strawberry patch and an area to grow potatoes. We are hoping that they will be ready to eat for Christmas. We are going to put a net over the strawberries so they don't get eaten by the birds. We also put straw around them to keep them off the soil and keep the water in. 




This weeks blog was written by us, Dylan and Jordan. Thank you for reading.

Term 2 Week 3 Working On Our Projects

Here Katie and Evelyn are working on the posters for our selling herbs.

Jordan, Eli and Dylan are also working on their posters

Fred, Carlos and Troydon and the rest of the class are potting our herbs we have grown from seed into the spraypainted tin cans that we prepared for selling.

We decided that instead of putting all of our plants for selling in a plastic crate we thought we could present our plants into a pellet shelf that Fred, Timothy, Taiva made.

We had to ask the wood work teacher to cut the pieces of wood to size but in the end we have a fantastic plant holder.

On Monday the weather was nice enough to get back out into the gardens and clean them up a bit. We got rid of most of the weeds but because of all the rain we had become overcome with weeds so unfortunately it means we need to do some more weeding!

On Tuesday we had Monique Dickson from Dairy NZ come to talk to us about Agriculture and what Agriculture is and the jobs in Agriculture her are a few photos below.

 She told us to get in a line from milked 0 cows to about 1000 or more to find out what we new about dairy farming and who had experience of working on a farm.

 We also had to get in line from most amount of dairy products consumed to least. I think the most was about 5 and it was only just lunchtime. It made us see how important dairy farming is in New Zealand.

 She talked to us about her job and what Dairy NZ does. We learnt all about the different careers that are available in Agriculture.

Blog written by Katie

Week 9: Sharing our knowledge and understanding with the community

This week we went to class and Mrs Digweed announced that the little kids from the daycare are coming and we were going to be the teachers.

Our goals for the lesson were to help and teach the little kids how to sow seeds into punnets.

Carlos showing how to use the float correctly

Carlos, Kyle and Troydon setting out the equipment

First of all we showed them how to do the task then we helped them to make they own. They sowed broccoli seeds

Kyle demonstrating his skills

"The bit I enjoyed the most was  writing the little kid names on the labels" - Carlos.

Eli, Fred and Dylan running through the demonstration

  "It felt good to help others" - Kyle

Jordon and Tim working together 

"It was fun to help others" Troydon

Written by Kyle, Carlos and Troydon. Thank you for reading our blog. 

Week 8: Sowing seeds and spraying the herb cans

This week we sprayed our herb cans with an under coating so that we can paint them later. Once we started spraying we realise that we didn't really know how to spray correctly and we ended up with some of the cans being uneven.  We are going to find and watch a video to learn how to spray correctly before we put the colour on.

We also sowed some seeds: Carrots,Beetroot and beans straight into the garden. These seeds do not need any special treatment and can be sowed straight into the garden.

 This is Taiva preparing his plot ready to sow the seeds.

 And this is also Taiva planting his seed.

This is our tadpole's in our class. We have put a rock in so they can get out of the water once they get their legs. They can breathe under the water when they are tadpole's but once their turn into frogs they need to breathe the air to get their oxygen.

 And once they grow up to be frogs we're going  to release them into the wild

Carlos is spraying primer on the cans for our can project to paint them

Jordan spraying the primer as well so we can paint them.It was fun.

Eli and Jordan are looking at a wasp nest.It was a bit creepy but interesting to look at using the magnifying glasses.

We done some game-base learning in on the computers. I could not wait to play the games. We had to grow our seeds into plants, I managed to get through the season and collect some seeds. Not everyone managed this as they did not make flowers, which went they didn't produce any seeds.

This weeks blog was made by the best people Timothy and Brittyn.

Week 6 Growing our seeds in containers

This week Dylan and Frederick had an interview with the Principal, Mrs. Hohneck, asking for permission to carry out our 'Big idea'.

The interview went extremely well, but Mrs. Hohneck pointed out that we would have to find a way to make sure they are watered and looked after, especially in the holidays.
She also mentioned that she would have to talk to the BOT and make sure they give the 'all go.'

When we arrived to Horticulture on Wednesday the 8th, Mrs. Digweed showed us some YouTube videos on how we could paint the cans so that they would be water-proof and look nice for displaying. We couldn't find any great videos, but we tried.

After that, we were told our Science Award Badges had arrived and that we would have to complete Horticulture-based tasks and get a total of 20 stars to earn our badges. We decided to sow some of our herb seeds so that we all could earn our first two stars. We were all excited to receive our first stars. We planted Coriander and Chives.


                          What The Badges Look Like

The boys reading the Science Badge booklets

We have got some tins and are nearly at the stage of painting them. Katie did some research about which paint to use and Mrs Digweed is going to buy it at the weekend.

Our plots are progressing nicely and we are sure to have some vegetables growing in our plots very soon!

                           Some of us hard at work!

This is a picture of us, Dylan and Frederick, the writers of this weeks blog. 

Thanks for reading!

Week 5 Which Herbs shall we grow?

 Today we made a survey online about which herbs would be best to grow in our hanging herb tin garden, we then sent it out to all of the teachers to do, we had 9 replies within 5 minutes. It was quite interesting to learn which herbs is used the most and what type of food they like to make with herbs.

 Down below we made a list of herbs we thought would grow well in tin cans,  to find the most popular ones we went through some seed packets that had been ordered and then figured the ones that have no seed packets left are the more popular ones.

Here we were planning the steps we needed to do to make our herb tin project work.

We all wrote some ideas onto sticky notes and put them on the whiteboard, then we picked the three most important ideas, which were:

1.~Getting permission from the BOT and the Principal.

2.~Find out information on herbs we want to grow

3~Write a survey and ask the food tech questions 

 Below is a few herbs you may like to plant at home

Here are the results from the survey we created.

You can see that Parsley is the most popular.

ANY OTHERS WE HAVE MISSED?

You can see from our results that a high percentage of staff would buy and use the herbs grown in cans. This make us see that it is worth going ahead with the Tin Can Project.

Thank you for reading Evelyn and Katie's blog!

Week 3: Research our project and preparing our gardens

Hi this week Timothy, Taiva and the rest of their classmates have been looking around the school to find suitable places to plant flowers to make the school look and feel welcoming to our visitors and nice for teachers and students.

This is our class making progress in making our plots. Their  names are Kyle, Troydon, Fredrick, Katie, Brittyn,Taiva,Timothy, Dylan, Eli, Fred, Evelyn.

The reason why we're doing this so that the soil gets air and it helps to improve drainage and help the plants grow.

Evelyn and Katie are watering and staking their tomato plant in their plot.

This is Eli, Fred and Jordan they are collecting top soil for their garden.

This weeks blog has been written by Timothy and Taiva .We hope you like it