INNOVATIONS

Chantelle Routley Diepeveen - Room 4

Lately we have been working on our Sprout Man. He is made of recycled onion bags with our compost in it and a pot plant. We have put salad sprouts in the compost so that the Sprout Man will grow little herbs that we can use in our salads and sandwiches. We have made a cape out of some old material and we mixed flour and compost together. We put the goop on the material and sprinkled seeds all over it. We will water the cape until the sprouts pop through then we will put it in out Sprout Man!

Room 4 have made a herb wall and I am going to tell you how. First some boys cut the tops off some plastic drink bottles (which we have been saving in the recycling) then we filled them with dirt. Then we tied about 8 bottles to the chicken coop fence on top of each other. After that we got a bottle with a lid and filled it with sand first then water. The lid had a hole in it, the reason we put the sand in first is because it will stop the water going straight through and drowning the plants below. Last we cut a square in each bottle and planted a herb or salad plant in them.

All of Room 4 were put into 4 groups to make sea sculptures out of rubbish we found on the beach such as plastic bags, plastic bottles, tin cans and fishing nets. We made a jelly fish out of plastic bags and a broken chair, a whale skeleton out of a net, wire and the top of a chair. We also made a diver out of a buoy for a head, bottles for arms and legs, 2 plastic gloves, bottle caps - ALL stuff we found on our beach clean-ups! My group made a fabulous starfish from old nets and fizzy bottles.

I love it that Opua School has the garden and we also have bees and chickens. Each creature produces something. Bees - Honey, Chickens - Eggs. We make egg sandwiches once a week to sell to help pay for chook feed and when we get honey we make honey sandwiches for free for the kids here at school.