Science for all

In the last three months New Zealand schools enjoyed their summer holiday break. Schools were open for just six weeks during this time, but we still delivered 1,524 science kits to schools, which equates to 123,000 experiments completed by 5-12 year old students across New Zealand.

Our shared community library model means the resource kits are used by many different schools, with a kit staying in a classroom for two weeks at a time.

Hundreds of volunteers replenish consumables and distribute the kits to their local schools each fortnight. It truly is a community effort, and one that teachers love. We thanked all our volunteers with food and fun at Christmas parties at all our 20 different locations.

Our kit production team have constructed 37 copies of the new Forest Health kit. These kits are now able to be used by our 700+ member schools, along with the other 42 topics in our science resource library. These new kits have been kindly sponsored by generous donors including the Freemasons Foundation who singlehandedly sponsored 21 copies of this incredible resource kit.

Links:

• News article: launch of our new forest health kit

In the last 3 months we have delivered 3,200 science kits to schools, which equates to 235,000 experiments completed by 5-12 year old students across New Zealand.

Our shared community library model means the resource kits are used by many different schools, with a kit staying in a classroom for two weeks at a time.

Hundreds of volunteers replenish consumables and distribute the kits to their local schools each fortnight. It truly is a community effort, and one that teachers love. Here is some recent feedback from one of those teachers:

“A great kit. The classes all loved looking at the skeletons and the pictures of Jack that you could put on the window. The junior classes liked putting the x-ray together like a jigsaw on the mat so they could see the whole skeleton. Everyone completed the chicken bone experiment with great predicting, observing and explaining: students were the experts telling their teacher what was going to happen and why.”

Our kit development team have been busy writing a new topic to add to the library: Forest Health. This has received fantastic feedback from the first few schools that used it.

• teacher feedback on new Forest Health kit (PDF)