Tahatai Coast students clean up
Beach becomes an outdoor classroom
Being just a stone’s throw from the beach, the students of Tahatai Coast School have a close connection to the water.
It’s why teachers at the school, including Pauline Uden, selected te moana for their Term 3 learning focus.
As part of the focus, they organised an epic sea clean-up when 250 students from the school headed out to clean their local beach.
The process started with students using whakatauk¯ı to understand the connection between the ocean and people.
They have been learning about everything from the wildlife to microplastics and how they can be guardians of the water.
This inspired Pauline to register for a Nestle´ for Healthier Kids Sea Cleaners kit.
These packs provide resources such as gloves and bags for children to get out and clean waterways in a safe way, as well as teaching resources to educate future generations about the impact of not disposing of waste properly.
Pauline says because of the school’s proximity to the coast, many students have an affinity with the beach and the ocean.
“What our school does is, each term, we have a focus for what we call our connected curriculum and this term it was looking at te moana
— our ocean, sustainability, our environment and the idea of whakatauk¯ı — the idea that everything is connected, everything we do has an impact, and what our responsibilities are around that sort of thing,” she says. “So this was part of that.”
Conservationist Nathan Pettigrew visited the school to talk about ocean creatures and the impact things like plastic can have on them.
“The Nestle´ sea cleaners kit helps support the school do a clean up if they want to — a clean up of their local area. Tauranga Moana is right on our doorstep so, of course, they connect with it, they surf there, they do their surf lifesaving and at the time we were doing it, there were a lot of seal pups so they get the idea.”
The clean-up covered around a square kilometre and included streets between the school and the shore.
“We did actually find some little beads of plastic that were potentially from the Rena, so that’s still there. The kids understand that and how that impact is affecting the sea life. And you could see them go ‘even if we throw it in the rubbish dump, it’s going to leach into the water’ so you could see they were connecting those problems and thinking about the future.”
She says the students see themselves as kaitiaki [guardians].
Food wrappers were the most common type of rubbish found, along with plastic, bottle tops, glass and plastic bags.
The clean up fits with the local curriculum as it relates to values.
“As a school we have values around responsibility and respect, so that fits in with our local curriculum, and with our wider New Zealand curriculum it fits under the concept of sustainability.”