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Success Story: Colville School Orchard Planting (Kiwi Can Coromandel)


	Kiwi Can Coromandel chose to plant an orchard as their environmental project. Prior to the planting day Kiwi Can children at Colville School took part in lessons about composting and worm farms. In addition to the planting of the orchard, work was also done on creating a shadehouse to allow this to be a long-term project within the community. Hector Connor, kaumatua, came from Thames to offer cultural guidance to the project. He explained the cultural context of his actions. He then proceeded to walk around the orchard, visiting each planting site, chanting karakia, with the kids following. Three citrus trees were planted to represent laying down the mauri for the orchard. Each was planted by a tuakana-teina pair of students, comprising one of the eldest student and one of the newest students. More karakia were recited, and the trees blessed with blessed-water.

	A nearby shadehouse was cleared and cleaned and the kids mulched the floor with card and bark. Although the re-covering the shadehouse was not completed on the day, two community members have committed to finishing this job with student assistance on another date. The working bee was followed by a shared luncheon provided by the school's Board of Trustees. Follow up action has included shifting the community greenhouse from a site some distance away to the orchard site. It is hoped students will use this in the future to grow vegetables and tree seedlings for planting and fundraising. UPDATE: 09 August 2010 At Colville School, students have been busy goal setting around how they want to develop the school orchard space. As a group they are working on ways to keep motivated along the way. This term students are rebuilding the walls of the Colville School greenhouse with recycled soft drink bottles. This is a long job, and means threading hundreds of plastic bottles onto bamboo poles. Not too difficult, you may think. But imagine how repetitive this is! Students will really have to keep motivation up to complete this. Other ideas students have come up with for developing their orchard include: creating a pathway through it building bird boxes and bird feeders completing the revamping of the shade house building some bench seats developing flower gardens creating an entrance archway doing up the boat painting a mural. Kiwi Can leaders are exploring working on one or more of these project developments. They are also working with the whole school (2 classes) for just over one hour per week on this project. This will continue over Term 3, and possibly over Term 4. Students are working together in groups of four, utilizing a tuakana-teina framework, which is proving to be really successful and to be developing great strengths in the older students. *Well done to KC Coromandel for continuing to integrate environmental sustainability into lesson plans, and to build so effectively on last year's project!*	This environmental project took place on 21 August 2009, and was reported by Bronwyn Blair, Kiwi Can Co-ordinator Coromandel. Well done to Bronwyn, her Kiwi Can Leaders, Kelvin Wirihana and Jenna James, and all community members involved! Click here to see how this action has been brought back to the Kiwi Can classroom through integration into health topics in the subsequent term >>

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