Learning through Discovery

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Love your parks

Hi my name is Peter and I work at Department of Conservation in Tauranga,

Discovery Days are one of my favourite things about schools in Tauranga. It is great to see students and teachers learning about our beautiful native wildlife and landscapes.

I wanted to tell you about Conservation Week which is happening in September. The theme is "Love your parks":

This year is the 60th anniversary of the National Parks Act which was a law passed by the New Zealand Parliament. The law was to create reserves for New Zealanders to enjoy their natural and cultural history and heritage for free, and to protect those areas from being used or developed the wrong way.

Tauranga has lots of parks and reserves. My favourite is Yatton Park in Merivale, but I also like McLaren Falls Park and also the Kaimai Mamaku Forest Park in the Kaimais.

Which is your favourite park and why do you like it?

We have two national parks near us in Tauranga. One is the Tongariro National Park which has volcanic eruptions happening right now. The other is Te Urewera National Park which is the home of the Tuhoe people and has a beatiful lake called Waikaremoana, which you can walk around (it takes five days)!

We are organising a planting event at Athenree near Waihi Beach to celebrate Conservation Week. Let me know if you want to get involved.

You can register your own Conservation Week event at: www.conservationweek.org.nz

Monday, June 18, 2012

Greetings from room 16 at Maungatapu Primary School. We are very excited as in term 4, we will be going on the Coastal Discovery Day.

Last year we had an amazing time at Mclaren Falls on the Forestry Discovery Day. It had been raining really heavily and there was lots of mud and water around. We explored the bush, listened to bird calls, looked at trapping, cleared trapping lines, identified trees and types of seeds and planted seedlings. We even helped build a new bike track!

Van and Mike came to our class after our visit and talked about what we saw, the things we were doing in our class and showed us maps of our local areas to understand how to read the different geographical features using a key. It was really valuable to have them come in and share this time with us and allow us all to celebrate our learning.

As part of our Scientific Report Writing focus for the term, and our visit to the forest, we decided we would like to create the native creatures we were writing about. One of our dads brought in a special machine that cuts sheets of polystyrene and we cut and and painted life like replicas of our creature. We then made a label, like you would see in a museum displaying our creatures scientific name, habitat, threats etc. One of our groups made a life size replica of the extinct Haast Eagle! We showed Van and Mike these and felt very proud of our selves!

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Room 3s trap fundraiser

Rom three did a fundraiser to buy a rat/stoat trap. They got the money by helping around the house and they had a shared lunch and a crazy hair day. The trap that they got was an A4 smashing trap. They kill 24 rats/stoats before resetting.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Room 2

Room 2 also went to the rock pools and had a hunt for the starfish, crabs and the fish in the eco-system. Everyone wanted to catch the camoflage crab but only two groups managed to catch them. The most common catch was shrimps but the hardest was tiger fish.

Our place and our Mauao adventure.

In term 1 we were learning about our place. We had an adventure around Mauao. We went to the rock pools and saw the eco-system. Then we went up to the bush and saw the traps that are used for catching stoats, rats and possums. When we got back we were so inspired that we made our own projects about the eco-system that we saw on the trip.