Pupils’ theories have been flying around the South Canterbury primary school after a large nest with four huge, colourful eggs mysteriously turned up at the school two weeks ago.
The pupils all had their own ideas of what could be inside but the most popular suggestions have been a moa, bigfoot, dragons, a massive spider, dinosaurs — a Scorpious Rex to be specific — and ninjas.
Pupil Nico Andrew was very certain a bigfoot was soon to hatch.
"When I came out of breakfast club I saw [the eggs] on the rocks and they made me smile.
"I think bigfoot is inside because there are some monsters out in the forest that are big.
"The eggs are big and bigfoot starts with big."
He also theorised the mother bigfoot must have snuck into the school at night to leave them there and that when the eggs hatched the bigfoots would have to stay inside at playtime so they would not get hurt.
The nest and eggs were the idea of teacher Katherine Nichelsen as a way to inspire the pupils’ creative writing.
"We did a book week last year, so this year I thought, why don’t we do a writers’ week as well?
"I thought it would be good to have something that would ignite their imaginations and get more creativity out of them.
"I Googled a lot of different ideas and then we landed on the eggs and thought that would be a good one to do."
"They’re meant to do this hour of reading, writing and maths a day so the whole thing was how can we make that more exciting."
The idea definitely achieved what it was supposed to, she said.
"A lot of them jumped right in.
"Overall I think the idea definitely got them wanting to be more involved in writing."
The pupils were also visited by staff from the Timaru Library, the South Canterbury Museum and the New Zealand Raptor Trust, who all shared their theories and gave practical lessons on what could be inside the eggs.
Mrs Nichelsen said the eggs definitely were not far away from hatching.
"Each syndicate is going to get an egg and will have a code cracker to get to the egg.
"Inside are a bunch of novelty pens which links back to the whole idea of them being used for writing."
The eggs were meant to "hatch" the same week they were first put out but with recent staff shortages things were slightly delayed.
The hope was to continue to run a special exercise like this on a yearly basis.
