Sunshine awards at Epuni School

At Epuni School we’ve started the ‘Sunshine Awards’, to acknowledge the good things and deeds that are associated with Project Sunshine and to encourage our little farmers to look for the goodness in others.

These awards also recognise that everyone faces different challenges – what is easy for one person might be a struggle for someone else. By focusing on the goodness in people, we also hope to encourage a culture of understanding and tolerance.

This morning we created a ‘Sunshine Corner’ at Epuni School. A map of New Zealand covers one wall and will soon be covered in several hundred pins, to show all the places our seeds have been sent! Our Sunshine Mobile snuggles happily in the corner, and a mail board shows some of the beautiful letters that we’ve received from people all round the country. This sunshine corner is also the home of the Sunshine Awards.

The awards are led by the students: if they see an act of kindness, goodness or courage then they write the person’s name on a piece of paper, explaining why they think the person should receive an award, and then place the piece of paper in the sunshine awards box:

We then give out the sunshine awards during the ‘family time’ assembly on Monday morning. The awards are a special cardboard charm on a finger-knitted necklace.

Each award recipient can choose one hand-coloured charm to add to their necklace. The necklaces will have a range of charms added to them over time – each one becomes a living artwork, worn with pride by our little farmers.

We love capturing some of the goodness that radiates out from Project Sunshine and our Epuni children love their Sunshine Awards!

What’s the buzz

Here’s the buzz from this week. Keep reading below to see what we’ve been up to!

Our ‘Sunshine Day‘ got a mention in the Hutt News newspaper, thanks to reporter Karoline who joined us for part of the morning. (You can check out more photos from the day here). We’re hoping to do a few more community plantings like this at some point this term, so watch this space for further information.

We’ve posted out many, many envelopes full of sunflower seeds this week. It has been bloomin’ lovely! Please get in touch if you’d like a packet, or if you know someone in New Zealand that would.

We’ve also updated our map – it’s really cool to see the little trail of flowers spreading around the country and we think our little farmers will be really surprised when they come back from the school holiday break and see how far their seeds have been sent.

We’ve been decorating more seed packets – trying to keep up with the demand! It has been fun watching my six-year-old paint these seed packets with watercolour and acrylic paint, and this morning we experimented with some hand-made stamps.

And finally, we want to say a huge sunshiney *thank you* to everyone who has given us financial donations, or other forms of koha this week. We’ll do a separate blogpost about some of the fantastic things that we have received in return for packets of seed, which will all go to the children at Epuni School. And the financial donations mean that we’ve been able to buy lots more stamps, so we can post out more envelopes! We’re a little bit in love with these gorgeous bee stamps, which just go so well with the aims of our project.