ENVIRO SCHOOLS
Schoolwide Opportunities
Curriculum
Extra Curricular
Learning Support
Who Are The Envirokids?
Verran Primary is a small Primary School surrounded by reserves in the middle of Birkenhead.
Verran Primary School is an Enviro School - winning the National Green Gold Environmental Award in 2004. Children, Staff, Parents and the local community are working at establishing sustainable systems within the school; children lead this - working in their lunch breaks.
Our projects are varied and involve the reserve areas surrounding our school as well as internal processes.
Examples of activities are no-dig gardens, compost bins, worm farms, planting in the reserves, maintaining our gardens, reducing waste to the landfill, recycling where and when we can (paper and food scraps) and reusing wherever possible, planting native trees, enticing the Kereru and Tui to our trees, a skink garden and developing an orchard.
What are Enviroschools?
Enviroschools are schools and early childhood centres which commit to being part of a nation-wide programme of environmental education for sustainability.
Enviroschools is a learning framework
Enviroschools is a national programme run by the Toimata Foundation based in Hamilton. It offers a rich learning framework for action to follow embedded with Māori perspectives.
The framework process can be used to help create a sustainability vision for the Enviroschool, to plan and take social and environmental actions, to collaborate on projects and to help integrate all aspects of an Enviroschool.
Enviroschools undertake their own pathway to be more sustainable with measurable signposts, recognised as Bronze, Silver and Green-Gold.
How would it work in a school?
Having a worm farm is popular in Enviroschools. Here is an example of how an Enviroschool can deepen real learning and actions to make wider connections from worms:
Students may just learn how a worm farm works and enjoy the actions for being kaitiaki/guardians of the worms.
A next step, or at another Year level of an Enviroschool, is when they see how the worms turn their food waste into a resource, which could be given away or sold, or used for a garden as nature intended. They may choose to develop or revisit a garden. A garden is a rich learning resource on its own for a range of science and problem solving activities. Depending on the purpose or goal that students may want to reach then the worm farm resource and/or garden can then become a local resource for a wide variety of other purposes.
At Bronze level, the Enviroschool may just use their garden produce in their school or early childhood. At a Silver level, they may also be feeding their chickens, or fundraising, or exchanging with the community. At a GreenGold level this same worm farm may be supporting a garden that is also specifically catering for meals for their neighbours without a garden.
Students who are knowledgeable start to understand the bigger picture of their community, and plan a sustainable action that benefits their community.
