Sustainability
We have changed our page photo to show the progress of the revegetation project at Andersons Road.
Planting at NPS and Sheet Lighting Event and Barbeque at Andersons Road Newham
The first Tuesday after the holidays on 16 April, Newham Primary School will be having a planting afternoon in our Biodiversity Learning Hub at 2:30pm. The 4/5/6 and F/1 class will work together to restock our plants. Newham Landcare will be providing support and Hamilton Planters, which are specially design tools for digging the holes. The 4/5/6 class will prepare the holes earlier in the day. Parent volunteers are needed to support our students!
After the planting, families are invited to head straight on up to Andersons Road triangle (corner of Andersons Road & Boundary Rd, Newham), for a Newham Primary School run barbeque, starting about 5:00pm, followed byan exciting light sheet insect survey with John Walter, local Field Naturalist. John will set up special lights designed to attract insects and will be on site until midnight recording all of the insect visitors. The survey will provide a baseline for the number of insects at the Andersons Road site, which Newham PS helped revegetate in 2023. John recorded over 200 different species in mid-March 2023 at a site near Heathcote so it will be interesting to see what our little site can produce at this time of year. Subsequent surveys will be run in future years to see how the habitat is providing for a diverse range of insects.
All welcome. Bring a torch. Perhaps a chair or rug. Parking: along Boundary Rd north of the Anderson Rd intersection.
What have we been doing in Sustainability classes?
We have been busy over the past few weeks with lots of outdoor classes. The students have been learning about aquatic macroinvertebrates (waterbugs) that live in the tributary and pond next to the school. They identified a broad range of critters, including freshwater snails and muscles, water mites, whirligig beetles, boat swimmers, flatworms and leeches.
Another outdoor activity the F/1 and 2/3/4 classes have been involved in, is seed saving. Jo Thompson came to the sessions with her expert knowledge of how to save seeds. The students learnt about leaving plants to set seeds, which plants to collect seeds from, how to extract seeds and the importance of keeping them dry.
Animal and Nest Box Monitoring Workshop
On Tuesday, we ran the third of our Junior Landcare and Victorian Biodiversity Grant workshop, Animal and Nest Box Monitoring Workshop presented by ecologist Karl Just. The students learnt how to find evidence of fauna and about techniques to monitor them, such as, safe trapping for collecting data, trail cameras and using pole cameras for nest boxes. Everyone then went outside to investigate the school grounds. Students found scats (poo), scratch and gnawing marks on trees, feathers and saw inside two of our nest boxes where sugar gliders had made their homes.
Thank you to our parent Morgan, and to the Upper Deep Creek Landcare Network facilitator, Ammie Jackson who attended the workshop and supported our students.
One of the most exciting aspects of this workshop was the photos and footage that our school trail camera has captured between November 2023 and March 2024. The Biodiversity Learning Hub in the south-west corner of our school grounds is providing habitat for sugar gliders, microbats, brush-tailed and ring-tailed possums and the threatened Brush-tailed phascogale!
Cardboard Drive
Do you have any cardboard or boxes lying around?
We are again collecting cardboard to sheet mulch the weeds in the Biodiversity Learning Hub. The cardboard will then be covered with organic much we have received from MRSC.
Cardboard can be delivered at any time.