OOWL blog:
Welcome to this week’s Outdoor Woodland Wellbeing Learning (OWWL) update! Our busy learners have been embracing the fresh air, building their resilience and getting stuck into some fantastic team projects.
We had a major teamwork mission this week, moving our compost bins to a brand-new area. Equipped with wheelbarrows and spades, the children worked beautifully together to shift the materials. Next, they co-operated to move a new raised planter into the polytunnel. We dug right down to the bottom of the old bins to find the rich, nutritious compost to fill it before moving the rest of the waste into the new bin set-up. To finish up, we planted garlic cloves for a spring harvest.
If you walk past our main reception, you will see some beautiful new additions from our next project. The children recycled and reused soil to create ‘lasagna pots’, carefully layering flower bulbs deep in the soil and planting vibrant winter flowers on top. This means we get lovely colour now and a wonderful surprise when the bulbs burst through next spring!
Our outdoor discoveries didn’t stop with plants. We set up a motion camera by a tray of seeds and were thrilled to catch a robin and a mouse visiting us! This sparked a huge conversation about what else lives in our woods, leading us to set up a humane mouse trap to see if we could get a closer look at our visitor. This gave us a wonderful opportunity to learn about wildlife ethics. The children practised an important rule: wild animals are not pets. We look and learn, but we never touch, and we always return them safely to the wild.
Finally, our garden has been incredibly generous this week. We have harvested a bumper crop of fresh grapes and figs, which are now under the outdoor shelter for you to take home. Please feel free to grab some treats at pick-up in exchange for a donation in our honesty box. Every penny raised goes straight back into our outdoor learning fund for new tools and seeds.
