Ngatapa School recently reflected on their ongoing Enviroschools journey, and as a result celebrated their achievement of becoming a Green-Gold Enviroschool. They are the first Green-Gold school in Gisborne region, having started their journey in 2007. The Gisborne Herald ran an article about the school's achievement, which can be downloaded here.
Students used healthy vegetables from their school gardens to whip up tasty meals this week.
The Enviroschools Mara Kai Masterchef Challenge was held at Te Poho o Rawiri Marae and attended by students from eight enviroschools around Gisborne.
“The beauty of the competition is it encourages healthy and sustainable living”, says Gisborne Enviroschools co-ordinator Anne Lister.
To compete in the challenge, students had to make a yummy lunch for six using at least five ingredients from their school’s vegetable garden.
The students started growing their herbs and vegetables at the beginning of the year, and could also use pickles and preserves made from produce they had grown the previous year.
“It’s great to see the kids take the plants right from where they start growing them to the table, resulting in healthy living and therefore a healthy body,” said Mrs Lister.
“It’s really a celebration of the fact that they have grown all these things and can now share them.”
Teams were made up of two student cooks who had been practicing their meal in advance, two student gardeners who had grown the organic ingredients, and a supervisor teacher.
Just like in a real master chef show, students had a two-hour time limit, and were expected to plate and present their dishes to the judges. They were also expected to discuss their dish and describe to judges how the five ingredients were grown.
Judging the event was Mark Gardner, head chef and owner of Colosseum, and chef James Peterson.
“It was a really fun day, there were lots of laughs and lots of learning,” said Mr Gardner.
“It was great to see the kids dealing with their own home-grown produce and preserves in such a creative way. There were definitely some future master chefs in the making.”
Gisborne region held a very successful fruit tree workshop in May this year. The aim of the workshop was to learn how to grow the best tree possible, so it holds lots of delicious fruit.
Points covered during the workshop were:
The day started with a powhiri, then the students from the host school presented their landscape design ideas, and then everyone took action to make the landscape design a reality. Trees planted in the orchard included feijoa, persimmon, mandarin, peach, grape and apple.
Three schools from Gisborne took part in the EcoHut Challenge and all agreed it was an awesome Enviroschools project!
Winners of:
Best User Friendly Space
Best Learning Space
Best Use of Found/ Donated Materials
Whatatutu school students are very proud of their EcoHut!
The walls of the Hut are made from bamboo that has been tied together with plaited harakeke. Rocks from the local awa have been laid to support the bamboo walls and harakeke mats provide a lovely place to sit.
The Whatatutu community got behind the students and donated iron for the roof, Real estate signs to be used as backing for the slating on the front of the hut and wooden pou that came from an old tree in a community members garden.
Winners of:
Best Water Conservation Design
Ngatapa's hut was made up from a variety of recycled materials that won them the Best Construction Award! Bunnings pallets and bamboo created the walls, wool fages were used to line the inside, iron from the teachers pigs pen created the roof and posts and nails were donated from a local family farm.
A very innovative way for collecting water which the students found on the internet earned them the Best Water Conservation Award!
Eastland Port has confirmed it's sponsorship of Enviroschools with the establishment of a Tairawhiti Action Fund that will make $4000 available each year for "student lead projects"
