Have you heard the word Kaitiakitanga? It means caring for our environment, and that is what our semester theme is. And these past two weeks we went to Tōtara Park and also went to the Botanic Gardens. So I will be telling you about what we learnt and how our mini scientific adventure went.

On a Tuesday a few weeks ago we found out our semester theme and were told the whole kāhu will be going to Tōtara Park ,to learn about how rain water and streams work. We were split up in classes and went on two trail walks to see all the different environments around us.

The teacher had told us to download an app called Seek, which helps identify which types of plants are from which family and what they are called. We had brought our device along with us to our learning adventure to make it easier to identify plants.

So in Week 2 on a  Tuesday we had left off to go to Tōtara Park to go on our trail walks, while we were walking there were lots of Trees and Mushrooms which we did not know the names of. So the Seek app had helped us to know which type of tree it was, so of the trees we had found were; Tōtara trees, Kowhai and trees in the dicot family which at the time I did not know what dicot was. 

But we were mainly there to see Puhinui stream and see how different it is in two places. 

In Tōtara Park the stream was mainly murky in most places because the day before it had rained heavily, so maybe that is why the stream water was mainly muddy. In most parts, what i had noticed was that when there were rocks the water was all clear so after the teacher told us that the rocks are in water, filter out the rain water from the streams and make it clean but when the mud gets to it turn in the muddy murky water again. 

But the stream in the Botanic Gardens was much more different than the  stream in Tōtara Park. In colour and filtration systems that I and many others learnt. 

But what I found really interesting in Tōtara Park was how they have so many different types of trees, plants and birds all in one place and it had left me with lots of questions that were answered in the trip to The Botanic Gardens.

After that we got back to school and went on with our day. Then we had launch  and all of us had many questions and someone had asked how do the trees multiply into such big bunches. And we learnt that trees that have seeds on the edges of the leaves, when they are ready they automatically plant them into the soil and if the rain is there it waters them which keeps creating more and more and more trees keep growing and when those seeds also drop it will plant more.

So the Next week we went to The Botanic Gardens which was to compare what we saw in the two places.

The Botanic Gardens trip was we were in groups with a adult to help us guide us in the places we had to task first of we had a scavenger hunt with the Seek app to try find every letter of the alphabet with the plants and flower around us and in the second half we went on a walk down to where the stream is to find out how it was different to the own we saw last week. Our team had gone on the hunt,first we found out where lots of flowers originate from and their scientific name and which had counted off lots of the letters of the alphabet. Our group had gotten lots of the letters except for lots of the rare letters which were quite hard to find. But we managed to do quite good compared to others. We also learnt where the flowers come from all over the world even if they are nearly gone.

In the next half we went on a trail right down to where the stream is, to see how the filtration system is different to Tōtara park’s filtration system. This time when we went down there were huge amounts of trees digging down to where the stream was.

Which is where we learnt why the trees were so sloped into the ground. It is because the roots of the trees near the water work as a type of filtration system for the water in the stream. And when the water goes near the tree’s roots and goes near the soil it filters through which somehow helps filter the water in the stream. 

After that we went back up away from the stream and found out how the rainwater works on the ground. First when it lands on the soil it can either go all the way down to the crust of the ground or it can just evaporate. But it could also just flow on top of the ground just to dry up.

After that we arrived back at school and I had tech that day so I could not do anything else. A few days after though we had a launch lesson where we talked about flowers and dicots but i did not know what those were so i asked then i learnt that dicots are a plant when they are seeded it can sprout in two parts or in one part. 

So in conclusion in those two weeks we had learned lots of things about our environment and how to be Kaitiakitanga for our environment and learnt how to protect it from bad things and learn how to not let those bad things happen to our freshwater streams and salt water. And to try to keep plastic out of our ocean and keep it in the bin to help our own environment.