The sandpit toys at Nature Kids got a serious upgrade last week, with CJ Industries coming along to show-and-tell.
The earthworks company brought a roller, a digger and a heavy truck to the early childhood centre to give the children a demonstration of how the machinery works.
The children crawled through the cab of truck driver Glen Wilson’s pristine vehicle, felt the rumblings through the earth when site traffic management supervisor Vaughan Lewis turned on his roller, and they were quick to find the horn on supervisor foreman Nathan Timoko’s digger.
The machinery was immobilised so that the kids could safely explore it, inside and out.
Little Gus Goodman is particularly passionate about heavy machinery and was even wearing a digger-themed tee-shirt on the day of the visit. Nathan, CJ’s digger operator extraordinaire, earned Gus’s approval by manoeuvring the eight-tonne digger to scoop up some fine dirt and delicately fill the back of the four-year-old’s two-kilogram dump truck.
The company has spent several weeks doing construction work on Queen Victoria Street, which is the kindergarten’s access road.
CJ’s health and safety manager Rupert Bunny says that they are aware that the roadworks have impacted local families, and they were keen to give the children a chance to engage with the machinery.
Nature Land teacher/kaiako Kate Whitehead says that the children have been watching through the fence with excitement as CJ Industries installed a new footpath in front of the centre.
“We were all super excited to have them bring their big toys in for us to see,” she says.
CJ’s senior project manager Chris Whale and construction manager Morgan Corrie-Johnston have also given the green light for the donation of staff time and resources so that work can begin on a Nature Kids bike track this week, using the “spoils” that are left from the Queen Victoria roading project.
The team say that this won’t cause delays to their primary project, which has about a month left to run, as there are downtimes in their schedule while they wait for other stages to be finished or services to be installed.
It has been a long-time dream for the centre tamariki to have a bike track of their own, and Kate says that they are so excited to have this become a reality.
“Our tamariki spend a lot of time on bikes at Nature Kids and a lot learn to ride a pedal bike with us,” she says.
“We have a pretty awesome hill with lots of tracks, but it is a shared space and we find ourselves bringing our bikes into the driveway more and more often. To have a designated bikes-only space with the bike track will mean our tamariki can build and extend on their current skills and can also provide a space for our whānau to hang out and connect.”
She says that the centre staff hope to plant to plant the surrounding area in natives and fruit trees, install some gates for safety and add some seating for families.
