Southland Girls High School at Bushy Point and the Community Nursery 1-2 April 2019
Southland Girls have been having their Community Breakout days at Bushy Point since 2005. Day one saw the various groups plant 100 native plants and carefully covering each plant with combi-guards. The OLG team of Barry, Chris, Sally, Lesley and Ray helped run this activity. Mark Oster took groups on a bush adventure as only Mark can! Tom Harding introduced the girls to all things pesty! Pat Hoffman and Hannah Sim took two groups at a time to the Community Nursery Education Centre and Rances Garden where they studied “sustainability”. At lunchtime there was a commemorative planting in memory of the Christchurch atrocity, where a student planted three significant totara trees.
On day two Bronwyn joined in with the activities being run by ES for the SGHS year 7 group (today was the second day of such activities). Pat and Hannah brainstormed and played mind opening games around the concept of sustainability and what this means and looks like. The girls did a treasure hunt around the nursery area looking at what is being done in a sustainable way, giving them lots of ideas and the starting point to their thinking around how they can take some of these ideas back to SGHS and their school grounds. It will be great to hear what happens at SGHS.
Then it was to Bushy Point where the group got to be in the NZ native bush (and for some this was their first time in the bush) learning all about how safe our bush is and looking at nests and then undertaking nest building for an imaginary 180 million year old stone bird! We had piwakawaka and korimako join us, and the totara forest gave a sheltered place for exploration and learning. After this fun with Mark, Tom took us along a pest line following the yellow markers. Animal pests were found, with some finds accompanied by loud shrieks. Possums, rats, stoats and other pests were looked at, a tracking tunnel was explained, some footprint identification was undertaken and a trap was studied to see how pests are killed. And we saw that it is not only animal pests that are a problem in our NZ forest, with Chilean flame creeper, a plant pest, seen and discussed.
The groups also did an environmental themed video making challenge with their teacher. A great day to be out in an area where the community is doing important planting, pest control and other valuable environmental work.
Chris and Bronwyn
Posted: 9 April 2019