The middles kicked off the year with a science and statistics investigation in the māra kai, māra rongoā (food and wellbeing garden). We learned all about pollination and the importance of bees. Our big question was "is our special garden healthy?"

It was exciting to learn all about pollination and then go to our own garden and investigate pollination in action! The tamariki set up their own statistics investigation and learned how scientists collect data to explore questions and prove ideas. We used tally marks to count how many bees, bumblebees and moths we could see pollinating the kamo kamo (squash) and hue (gourds). We used our awesome counting skills to time how long a bee took to collect pollen from 5 plants and talked about how we could average the time. Then the students made some sensible statements about what they found out.

"Our garden is healthy because there are tonnes of bees and they all have pollen on their bodies"

"Bees are really important to help the plants make fruit from their flowers and we can see the plants turning into fruit"

"The world should look after bees and bumblebees because they give humans food"

"Some bees take a long time to pollinate flowers, we counted up to 180 seconds three times!"

"I never knew moths pollinated flowers at night, we must have lots at Māpua because there are tonnes of gourds"

"I think there are male and female kamo kamo plants because they look different on the inside. There are lot's more male than female plants"

We have some budding 'living world' scientists at Māpua School!