For the past two years, our classes have been taught narratives and each child creates and publishes their own picture book. This year we discussed as a class how we could make this more meaningful, and one student suggested donating them.

After some class brainstorming, we had our plan. We created the books with an ‘uplifting’ storyline in mind. Once finished, we will visit St Kilda Kindergarten to work on our Tuakana Teina, and we will read our books to the younger children. Once we have done this we will donate all the books to the children’s ward at Dunedin hospital, so that the children staying there have something funny or uplifting to read in a time where they likely won’t be feeling that way.

We love how this project has given the students a chance to do something significant and realise that there are people less fortunate in the world and that they have the power to make their lives a little bit better.

We thought a lot about how we could connect with, and help our local community. It then struck us that there was something right in front of our eyes in our school community where we could make a difference.

Our long-serving caretaker has been seriously ill throughout Terms 3 and 4 and has not yet been able to come back to school. He works tremendously hard and takes great pride in looking after our native gardens. We realised that these were not being weeded at all and were not looking at their best. We got the students into the gardens for a cleanup.

This idea will hopefully go further than just maintaining the gardens, and we can start planning/costing etc. for new plants, new areas, and more.