SUSSED

Our Spring Term was a busy one! After taking part in Fairtrade Fortnight, and trying lots of fair-trade foods including bananas, chocolate (lots of chocolate!) and dried mangoes, we celebrated the Pod’s Waste Week with some composting, recycling and junk modelling.

We made a trip out to the forest, and brought back some sticks, cones and leaves which we used in language and craft activities. These activities earned us our Silver Award with the Woodland Trust. We also used some of the logs, sticks and cones to make a bug (not quite hotel) bedsit!

The New Forest Food Challenge supplied us with onions and pea seeds - the onions are in the ground, and the peas were sown and grown on in pots, and planted out just before we broke up. We also had a messy job planting our freebie potatoes from www.growyourownpotatoes.com

We received some free seeds from Grow Wild and Seedballs - which we plan to sow as soon as we get back. These will hopefully increase our chances of seeing some bees, butterflies and other beasts over the summer term.

Other activities planned for the summer include planting runner beans, pumpkins, sweet corn and sunflowers. In our quest to reach the RHS Schools Gardening Campaign Level 3 we will also be using some different tools in the garden, and use our garden to help teach some maths - measuring the height of our sunflowers, the weight of our potatoes and counting spots on ladybirds!

Next stop: SILVER! For others working with young children, the Eco-Schools Rupert Bear resources are perfect! A very green bear.