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Minimising Lunchbox Waste!
At BestStart Foxton Beach Kindy, we have been busy creating beeswax lunch wraps to minimise waste in our lunch boxes!
First, we looked at our ingredients. We had beeswax pellets which are produced by honey bees after they have gathered the nectar from flowers. Beeswax is waterproof, antibacterial, and anti-fungal which is perfect for wrapping food in. Tamariki enjoyed smelling the beeswax and talking about why honey bees are so important in our gardens and how they make wax. ‘Why isn’t the wax very yellow?’ asked Ryley. ‘Good question! That is because of the type of flowers that the worker bees have visited when gathering pollen’ said kaiako Diana.
Our next ingredient was pine resin (gum) from pine trees. Pine resin is really helpful in making the beeswax wraps sticky and clingy around our food. Tamariki enjoyed handling the crystals of pine resin and smelling the natural pine fragrance. This was a great opportunity to talk about our local forest where pine trees grow. Working with natural products like beeswax and pine resin helps us to understand the importance of the natural environment in our community. While we gently heated the beeswax and pine resin, tamariki chose a piece of cotton material for their beeswax wrap.
Tamariki were excited to choose the material they liked best. While we were choosing we could smell the beeswax and pine resin melting, this told us it was ready to use. Carefully, tamariki painted the melted beeswax and pine resin onto the cotton material. When covered all over it was time to dry them, and then they were ready to use as lunch wraps!