'See, feel, touch': How a riverside farm connects with community

A South Wairarapa riverside farm is turning into a rich classroom, offering lessons in science and the environment, maths, language, and legends of the land.A South Wairarapa riverside farm is turning into a rich classroom, offering lessons in science and the environment, maths, language, and legends of the land.Over the past few months, local schoolchildren have been heading down to the lower reaches of the Ruamāhanga River, bordering Ruamāhanga Farm.They look for insects and fish, help to plant trees on its wetland, and sometimes just sit on its banks and listen to its stories. Join a school day by the river at Ruamāhanga FarmWhen Country Life tags along, the morning starts as usual with karakia and children taking pretend snapshots of the landscape, describing their "photos" and introducing themselves.Then, after being warned about electric fences, with gumboots and backpacks on, a happy scramble of nine to 11-year-olds heads off through the paddocks and down to the banks of the awa.Sitting on eco-friendly woollen tree mats, looking out over the river, they tune into a story about the water's journey, with the noisy calls of real birds swooping over its banks woven into the kōrero.Storyteller Rod Sugden says he tries to incorporate real-life happenings into the tales to keep the story lively and the children engaged."We feel that these stories convey hidden messages, you could say, stories that can give children and young people a deeper sense of themselves, others around them and the world in which they live."Later, the children file down onto the gravelly riverbed and meet Kara Kenny and Maddy Glover from the conservation charity Mountains to Sea Wellington.Soon, they are all crammed around buckets of river water, identifying tiny fish and river insects and learning the difference between mayflies and stoneflies through an action game.Measuring water clarity with long pipes is a lesson in maths as well as science. Later, language and poetry will come to the fore when the children write about their experiences back in the classroom or in the new bell tent set up on the farm.Kenny says her own childhood memories exploring the region's rivers with her grandfather sparked her interest in freshwater ecology.She loves tailoring her riverbank lessons to the "ebbs and flows" of whatever has happened, even if things don't quite go to plan.After fish traps set the night before for a biodiversity survey were found to be empty of eels and trout, she switched to explaining the phases of the moon and told a Māori legend involving the maramataka…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details