Kitchen Garden - worm weed tea, soup and a pea-teepee

We had two sessions with Margaret today. In the first session, we made worm weed tea (liquid from the worm farms plus ‘weed tea’) – a nutritious drink for the garden, made by mixing weeds collected from around the school with dried chicken poo and water. This gave us the opportunity to practice using the wheelbarrow as we collected weeds from the enormous pile near the sandpit. 

 

 

 

 

  

After recess, we fed the garden with worm weed tea and water, fed the chooks (and found three eggs!). 

Then we picked some parsley, spinach and lettuce to add to our delicious garden vegetable soup that we got to eat at big lunch. It was delicious!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While this was happening, Kirsty worked with a small group of children to plant the pea seedlings in pots to form our ‘pea teepee’.

Thank you to Jo and Kirsty for being fabulous parent helpers today!

Three-way conferences

Three-way conference times and dates were sent home on Friday on small, white slips of paper - please look in your child's bag! If you don't receive one, email over the weekend or speak to Nerida on Monday. Sorry the paper was so small!

Friday Market 27 July - helpers needed!

Prep Bicicletta is rostered to run the next Friday Market on Friday 27th July. 

We need parent volunteers to help with the following things: 

• one person to pick up the sausages and bread (the school will pay),
• two people to arrive at 2:30 pm to heat up the BBQ and start cooking the snags by 2:45 pm so they are ready by 3:30 pm,
• lots of other helpers to arrive by 3:20 to staff the stall - set up your goodies to sell, work out prices, 
• people to help clean up afterwards, both the BBQ and the area around the market,
• and of course people to bring items to sell (edible or otherwise).

There will be a sign-up sheet up on the communications board on Monday - please put your name down to help. 

A few parents have requested that we buy some mechanised pencil sharpeners, so we are planning to buy these with the money you raise. If you have any other suggestions for how the money raised could be used, please let us know.

Community Walks

Hi Families! 

We are excited to announce that, as of Thursday 2nd August, Bicicletta will be going down to the Merri Creek each Thursday morning. The Prep team, with the help of some experts, have been doing research and would like to extend Project Time into the local community to allow children to explore nature, our local environment, landmarks and the great outdoors! This session will replace one of our Project Time sessions. We did this last year and it was a great success. We will pick a place along the Merri creek that we will visit each week and we will really develop a sense and understanding of this special place.

Families are most welcome (and needed!!) to come along with us, and if any one has (or knows someone who does) a knowledge of native flora and fauna in our local area - or just has a love of nature, or walking, or picnics, or good conversation and fun - we need you!!! We will leave school around 9.10 am and will return in time for recess at 11.30 am. We also cannot take this many preps out of the school unless we have extra adults, so please join in!

We will be going regardless of weather (unless there is extreme weather conditions!) so please pack weather-appropriate clothes - warm clothes, rain coats, gumboots, wooly hats etc.

Have a wonderful weekend.
Nerida

End-of-term clean up - thank you

Several parents came in on the last day of term to help us clean up. Amanda, Amelia and Kirsty spent hours in the Atelier. Kerrie helped move some furniture at the end of the day, as did some other parents who popped in just before the end of the day, like Hayley.

Thank you to Kerrie who took home lots of dirty smocks, table cloths and dress ups to wash over the holidays.

It feels great to be clean – no more crusts, marbles and chewed up pencils under furniture; no more overflowing piles of old resources in the Atelier crowding us, and clean table cloths to cover ugly tables! We couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you a thousand times over.

Leigh Hobbs visits BEPS

On Tuesday 17th July, Leigh Hobbs visited our school. The Preps spent almost an hour with him after lunch as he taught us how to draw his most famous characters – Old Tom, Horrible Harriet and Mr Chicken. The Preps took these illustrations home – we hope you admired the hilarious characters that they drew!

Cooking with the kitchen garden

Next Tuesday (the 24th) we will be cooking soup with Margaret using some veggies from the kitchen garden and from our pots on the terrace.  Please send a mug and spoon to school with your child so they can have a taste.  If you would like to join in and help, we will be gardening and cooking from 10-10:45, and again from 11:30-12:30.