Kia Ora and Welcome to Balmoral School's Eco Blog

Our Eco blog is an online community that shares ideas about Sustainability Education in and around our school community.

Our Eco blog was born from a think tank, called the Balmoral Eco Warriors.  The Balmoral Eco Warriors is an all age’s key environmental action group at our school who have a passion for keeping things sustainable since around 2008. The Balmoral Eco Warriors meet weekly on Thursdays in Room 26 – all new members are welcome.

At Balmoral School we endorse the New Zealand Curriculum key value of Ecological Sustainability. As educators we encourage this value, to be modelled and explored via embedding sustainability education through real life learning experiences, such as the inquiry process through cross curricular learning such as Art, Literacy, Maths, Rich Tasks, ICT and Philosophy, by utilising all of the Balmoral Habits.   As a school we work closely in partnership with the Auckland Council and their Educators around waste and gardening.

Our School is a Waste Wise School which means our school is on a contract with the Auckland Council to help educate our students and the community in ways to help reduce rubbish and recycle where possible such as paper, food scraps and general waste. We have approximately 50 kilograms of waste coming out of our school every day. Our goal and challenge as a school is to reduce this by recycling, reducing to ensure all lunchbox rubbish is returned home to be responsibly recycled. Waste found at school is to be placed in the school waste stations that situated around the school, Red coloured bins for general waste, yellow for recyclables and blue bins for strictly  paper.

We also have a school orchard on the far banks of our school field that we have worked in partnership with the community, planting, pruning, and fertilising.   We also have Whanau/Syndicates gardens wherein by classes are encouraged to grow vegetables with their classes and have garden to table experiences, explore and experience the process of the Farmers Market which will be held after school and/or the PTA Great Day Out and celebrate Matariki- the Maori New Year by planting vegetables as part of this annual celebration.

If you have any ideas and suggestions you would like to share about Sustainability Education please email me rebecca@balmoral.school.nz 

Together we can Manaaki Whenua - care for our land.