Six Trees and Six Flowers
What’s it all about?
If children are to learn to ‘see’ the trees and wildflowers around them, they need to come into contact with them little and often, as well as by having focussed teaching.
‘6 Trees & 6 Flowers’ is an exploratory project that will allow teachers to revisit the subject of local trees and flowers even while the focus of their teaching is on something else. If this light-touch approach is successful, it will help to realise the potential of the decade of tree planting that the children and their schools are involved with.
A shared aim is for all children leaving primary school to be able to recognise and name 6 British native trees and 6 local wildflowers, to be reinforced in secondary schools.
Background
Although now an annual event in the Andover school calendar, it was becoming clear that the planting of trees, although important, was being seen in isolation and opportunities for teaching and learning were being missed. In June 2017, with half the planting completed and 5 years left to go, we invited our partner schools to work with us over the remaining years to co-develop programmes that would help realise the potential of our shared work.
Format
Supported not only by environmental experts and gardeners but also by local musicians, storytellers, visual artists, crafters, writers and performers, this project invites teachers to co-devise and trial subject-based programmes that we hope will realise the project’s aims, whilst connecting children to nature practically, creatively and inspirationally.
Projects on offer include:
The visual arts: land art, drawing, sculpture, embroidery, batik, fabrics & dyes from plants
The performance arts: music, poetry & prose, story, dance
The sciences, design & technology: growing from a seed to a plant, manufacturing processes from plant to product, climate change and the role of trees in mitigation, sustainable forestry
The global context: exploring the impacts of a changing world on minority cultures in NW Vietnam
Some great results, derailed by a global pandemic
Five schools with children aged 4 to 16 initially rose to the challenge; four stayed the course until early 2020, when global events made it difficult for schools to complete their work with us. We created online resources and encouraged families and teachers to use them, but take-up was patchy. Post-pandemic, three schools returned to the programme in 2022 but with new headteachers and changed priorities, we were unable to collect all the data that we had hoped to use.
Projects Included:
Ash tree stream: An art and outdoor learning project.
Flowerbed Story Time: A Grow Wild community project
Connecting to Trees - Seasonal woodland visits 2019-20
One Ash: Sustainable Forestry, wonderful ways with wood, the plight of ash trees
Voices in Harmony: Blending human and tree voices
