Sustainability @ TPPS 

Our Preps have been very creative this fortnight!  They have made a beautiful display in the Sustainability room all about blue-banded bees, and planted blue, purple and yellow flowers to attract pollinators to our garden.  We were very excited to see that Greg had hung up our insect hotel for us. 

In Grade 2, we have been investigating the features of grass and leaves.  We explored the garden with magnifying glasses and an information sheet to decide which plants might be grasses.  Some features grass has are long, narrow leaves, veins going in the same direction, and fine roots that look a bit like hair.  We also learned the parts of a leaf and drew some amazing labelled diagrams of the leaves in our garden.

Grade 5 are really fun-gis! We made some extremely clever 3D models of interesting types of mushrooms from around the world.  There are some very strange ones out there! One fact we learned was that mushrooms are just the fruiting body of the hidden main part of the fungi which is called the mycelium network.  It can stretch for kilometres underground. Excitingly, we have started to grow our own mushrooms in kits.

Grade 6 worked very hard this fortnight, preparing for our gorgeous new hens.  We worked outside in the sunshine, mulching, pruning, weeding, watering, and feeding the worms. We learned that when worms are climbing up to the lid of their worm farm, it is too wet or acidic inside for them and we need to add some dry material.

In just a few hours at TPPS, our 20 week old New Hampshire Reds have already learned how to access their food and water, and find their roost for sleeping on at night. Clever chooks!

We have noticed that they look very similar to each other, so we will be putting some comfy coloured bands on their legs to help us tell them apart.

Saying Hi to our new hens!!