Gardening is a wonderful addition to Woodland school and we are very lucky to have Mrs Saunders, our gardening expert, to lead children in their gardening learning.

Each week children in Y1 and Y2 have the opportunity to do some gardening. We are blessed with a fantastic space to nurture an interest in growing plants - bringing with it, opportunities to consider where our food comes from, what it takes to grow our food, as well as learning about the importance of planting for wildlife - especially to look after pollinators by planting flowers alongside vegetables (companion planting). All the while, the children have a chance to interact with all sorts of bugs that can be found in our garden and this leads to conversations about life cycles (e.g. last term, we found rose chafer beetle larvae in the raised beds) and food webs (e.g. the pesky aphids on our bean plants were being eaten by helpful ladybirds)!

Over the year the children have had the chance, as part of woodland school, to sow seeds, look after and transplant seedlings, carry out weeding and watering, through to harvesting produce - just last week, the children harvested Broad Beans which they took to the school kitchen for cooking, to add to the selection of vegetables on the lunch menu!

The gardening that children take part in also reinforces their learning in class e.g. identifying parts of the plant.