Spring Show in Adel

If you are interested, Class 9 have entered their poems and handwriting into this Show

ADEL & DISTRICT HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY SHOW

SATURDAY 14TH APRIL

2PM

METHODIST CHURCH HALL

HOLT LANE

ADEL

What a crazy time of year.....

With the school closed for a training day, there was a lot of work to be done in the garden for our little groups yesterday. The weather this past week, has been unprecedented, with temperatures of 20 degrees.  This is not typical March weather, more like June, but hey, we're not complaining!  

Most of the children spent the afternoon planting seeds in trays - one or two started to get bored with the activity, but we explained that this was all part of the garden cycle.  We think some children expect flowers and vegetables instantly, but they kept to the job and we've got an impressive display of trays spread across our polytunnel, with many plants already growing.

Jacob and Cameron finally got their hands on the paint and painted their design on the bird hide in the wildlife area. It looks really good and even got a compliment from a passer-by.  Robbie and Gavin, our digging team, planted the potatoes in a bed and got them going and then went around watering with the hose.

Miss Golia and Class One have reserved a vegetable patch for their own planting as well as Mr Gamble's Class 4.  It's lovely to see the teachers bringing their classes out and using the garden as part of their curriculum and topic work. Funtime, our after school club, have also asked for a raised bed and will be planting their own veggies too.

Wednesday Gardening Club

After Easter we will be launching our Gardening Club for the parents/carers who are interested in gardening or want to help out generally.  Introduced on the last coffee morning, it is started to take off with several parents wanting to join. It looks like it will be on Wednesday afternoons from 1.15pm to 2.45pm, so I will be able to join in too. Please contact either Mrs Whitley or Mrs Hawkins for further details or just watch this space.

Watering Rota

A Big Thank You to Mrs Strahand, Freya's dad, Mrs Land and Rachel for volunteering to come in and water the garden, polytunnel and various pots around the school every day. We've now got a rota and its working out   one day a week of watering for them, which is a fantastic help and taken a huge problem off our hands.  If you would like to help, please make yourself known.  Watering the plants is a massive headache for us, so any offers of help is a huge bonus.

Thank You, Mrs Harrison!

Joshua Harrison's grandma has been very generous and has sent in a huge bag of seed packets for our garden. We really do appreciate donations like this and it really does help.  We try very much to be self sufficient with our funding with our garden sales and other activities, so Mrs Harrison's seed donation is a huge bonus for our garden and the children's work there. Thank you.

Bug Hunting

Friday afternoon was a rather chaotic afternoon as the school was celebrating Sports Relief and the children were doing penalty shoot outs on the field. We managed to get our groups together, but spent a lot of time popping our heads over the fence towards the field to see which class was out, and sending the corresponding child over to take their penalty kick!

We decided to do a bug hunt, mainly as a lot of children will run off squealing as they've touched a slug or a spider has crawled up them.  So we wanted to get up close and personal to the mini beasts that hang out in our garden.  It was a fascinating afternoon as we found spider eggs and three cocoons in our bird hide, as well as slugs, woodlouse and lots of worms.  The children loved it.

Mrs Bailey popped up for a visit and instantly got kidnapped by the children, who insisted on giving her a personal guided tour of the garden.  It was lovely to see her - she got a full update of everything that's happening in the garden - later, the children cut some daffodils for Mrs Bailey's office and Taylor presented Mrs Laycock with some daffodils too.  She was delighted with the thoughtfulness of it.

Frog Spawn

Arrived at school this morning and was greeted by two large bowls of frog spawn sitting by the office window! Aaargh!  Need to deal with it as Mrs Hall and Mrs Hyde weren't looking impressed by having hundreds of eyes watching them!  Dear Mrs Whitley leapt to the rescue and put our newly acquired spawn in the pond where it belongs.  Thank you very much, Mrs Turner for bringing it in as promised and its a great addition to our pond - let's hope that they take up long term residence there!  It was just a bit of a shock on my first morning back after the weekend!

Volunteers
After Cameron's mum offered to help us last week, Freya's dad has also volunteered his services to help water the polytunnel during the morning.  We've now got about 3 helpers covering that job and has made us feel less stressed about keeping the plants watered. We'd like to think that more people will now come and join us and as you know, you'll won't be turned away!  Mrs Whitley is usually on the playground in the mornings and afternoons or leave a message for me at the school office.  We're waiting your call!

and we've just had another offer of more frog spawn from a child in reception!  

Us having fun in the garden!

Taylor and Cobie making their snake house

Planting and watering seeds

Mrs Whitley supervising!

 

Gavin moving our big pile of manure

Having fun in the bird house

More seed planting

The Garden this week

With me being classroom bound on Friday, I only managed to get out into the Spring sunshine on Thursday afternoon.  The weather was gorgeous with all of us shedding our coats as the session wore on. We are madly planting seeds, the polytunnel is rapidly filling up with trays and the children were delighted to see the first seeds sprouting from the pots that were planted earlier!  We had a brief celebration before returning back to our digging.

Jacob and Khalid, as part of their class work, have been interviewing various members of staff around the school and on Thursday, it was my turn as the gardening staff member. Mrs Whitley conveniently disappeared to the far reaches of the garden and refused to return until it was safe. I'm lucky to get a photo of her at the best of times, so the lads had no chance of interviewing or videoing her.  It's not my favourite pastime either and cringe at my picture and loathe my voice. So with Jacob asking the questions, we stood by the future runner bean bed while Gavin and Robbie prepared it and took a deep breath.  Jacob had prepared his gardening questions well and we chatted so much that Khalid's video ran out of time!  Then we went on a tour of the garden, when the boys revealed that they were submitting it to the BBC's "School Report". Oh crikey ........

So I missed helping the children with the chores - Sana, Suwera and David worked outside planting tomato seeds, Jacob returning from his reporting duties, watered the trays and tidied up, Gavin and Robbie made a great team and sorted out the beans. It was just a very busy warm day.

Mrs Whitley, bless her, carried on without me on Friday, but was joined by Mrs Colefax who helped enormously last year, mainly with the hard work of digging. She is a real trouper and a valuable member of our team. Recently other commitments have kept her away from the garden, but she's itching to come back.  I know she thoroughly enjoyed herself and I thank her for coming to help with our gardening groups.

Coffee Morning

Our coffee morning session on Tuesday allowed us to introduce ourselves to the parents.  Most of the parents do know what we do, but not in great detail and that we are always looking for helpers.  On Tuesday we had a lovely group of Arabic mums to chat to and we have offered them a vegetable bed so they can grow Middle Eastern foods (if our climate will let them) so the children can experience world wide vegetables too. We, ourselves, are growing traditional English foods like purple carrots to show the children that carrots aren't always orange, dead straight and sealed in plastic bags and also there's possibility of some Kenyan vegetables if we can source them. It was a really lovely session and a great chance to work with other groups in our community.

Miss Mole from Funtime has offered to be our scout and will help us buy stuff and get it back to school. It is quite difficult to go out and purchase items as I work at school all day and Mrs Whitley hasn't got access to a car. That would be a great service from Miss Mole - we give her a shopping list and she can source it for us.  That's very generous of her and an enormous benefit to us.

Cameron's mum has offered to help from September, but hopes to call in periodically whenever she can.  Mrs Whitley and I are hoping that this is the start of things to come and we can build up a healthy parent helper base for the garden.

Watering

If anybody can spare 10/15 minutes when they dropped their children off/pick them up, to bob up to the garden and water the poly tunnel plants, please let yourself be known to Mrs Whitley or Mrs Hawkins!  We can't do it all the time and just need a little band of volunteers.  If we get enough, hopefully it would be just a once a week task for one person. If you can organise a little group, all the better.  Thank you.

Thank You

to Asda, Holt Park for giving us a box of pansies and violas for free. It all helps make our garden and our school are brighter place to work in and every little gesture like that, is very much appreciated.

The Pond

Interserve are hoping to start work on making modifications on our school pond after Easter, so the children can go into the wildlife area, with us knowing that there won't be a large splash and little Johnny doing backstroke in the pond weed!  Mrs Turner has offered us some frog spawn, so "yes please, Mrs Turner" once Interserve have finished their work!

Sunflower Competition
The Sunflower Competition has really taken off and we 've had an excellent response.  There are still envelopes of seeds for sale, so still bring in your 20p's next week if you want to join in.  Best to find Mrs Whitley and ask, though I do believe she has been visiting the classrooms as well.

A Big Thank You

to the Holt Park Leisure Centre for giving us lots of clothes for our Olympic Scarecrows project - very much appreciated!

Sunflower Competition

Cookridge Primary School's Tallest Sunflower Competition

Closing date: Monday 10th September 2012

Entry fee:20p

You can buy an envelope of seeds for 20p from Mrs Hawkins or Mrs Whitley and then grow your sunflower either at home or at school.

You have to measure your sunflower and take photos of it

The 20p goes into the Garden Fund to help us buy garden equipment.

There are posters everywhere in school and if you want more information about the competition, just have a word with Mrs Whitley and Mrs Hawkins!

Busy, busy, busy

With the weather being extremely kind to us, we've been able to work in the garden with the children on both Thursday and Friday afternoons.

Thursday saw Cameron and Jacob putting their prize winning Bird Hide design actually on the bird hide - both the boys had camouflage colours in mind and now are starting to put it into reality, by sketching the design on to the wooden panels.  They can't wait to paint it, but the weather though sunny, is still very cold and yesterday, an unexpected rain shower, nearly caught us!

Husnain and Leon worked together as a great little team, emptying one of the beds of last year's cabbages and weeds ready for digging. They were a dream team. When  Leon shouted "Hey, buddy, I need your help, buddy!" to Husnain, it had Mrs Whitley and I laughing so much we had tears in our eyes.  

Sana and Molly stayed warm in the polytunnel and continued the ongoing job of planting seeds!  Well done, both of you, it's just one of those jobs that needs to be done.  Hopefully in a few weeks, you will see some great results appearing out of the pots!

On Friday, Taylor and Cobie built a shelter for snakes, hoping that any local grass snakes may take up residence. Cobie is totally mad about snakes so it was his idea to create this house out of logs and some of our surplus dung (knew it would have other uses!) and place it in our designated wildlife area. Just need some snakes now! The cabbage patch got a good digging over with Cami, Codie, Mackenzie and Alex working in shifts, Freya, Raegan, Nada and Mariyyah planted more seeds and watered the others, Billy was busy designing and planning the wildlife area to his specifications and we picked some daffodils that are growing in the garden, to brighten up the school inside.

Ultimately, the garden is their garden.  Mrs Whitley and I want the children to be fully involved and taking responsibility for the garden from planning, making decisions, designing, putting forward their ideas and wishes, through to the maintenance of the garden, the cultivation of the vegetables and flowers and the harvesting as well as just having a chance of getting mucky and collecting worms by the handful.  They love every single minute when we're out there and we have trouble getting them back into class sometimes!

Coffee Morning on Tuesday 13th March 0900am

Mrs Whitley and I are joining the coffee morning on Tuesday to welcome anybody who is interested in our work in the garden.  If you are interested in volunteering in any way or have any ideas that could help us, we would love to meet you. Or if you just want to find out out what we do and our work with the children, just call in for a chat with us. We look forward to meeting you on Tuesday!

Sunflower Competition

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be selling small envelopes of sunflower seeds for 20p each, which you can take home and plant. Later on in the year, we will be awarding a prize to the tallest sunflower, but we need photographic evidence (unless you want us coming round your house!)

So you will need to take a photo of you, measuring your sunflower in the summer and making a note of its height and sending it into school for Mrs Whitley or Mrs Hawkins to judge!

WATCH THIS SPACE!

Bulbs, bulbs, bulbs!

Daffodils on Hillcrest Rise

Hey, I've just parked on Hillcrest Rise and noticed that our daffodils that we planted last autumn are nearly in flower!  Give them another week and  more of this glorious spring-like warmth and sunshine that we are having today and there will be a splendid display!  Tell everybody that Cookridge Primary School planted them with a little help from Groundworks and Councillor Ben Chastney and don't they look wonderful - certainly brighten up a long piece of grass verge.

And don't forget to check out the daffodils on Otley Old Road that we planted the year before!!!!

Bluebells in Breary Marsh 

A couple of years ago, pupils of Class 7 that year (you know who you are) walked to Breary Marsh on a cold, snowy winter's day and re-planted loads of bluebells that had been moved because of a new path.  On Monday, I was walking through the woods with my dog and started to look for any evidence of the bluebells re-appearing.  There are some little sproutings, but I think it could be garlic. As I'm over there quite a lot, I promise to give you an update on our Breary Marsh bluebells!  We are certainly very busy in the local community with our planting.

Holt Park Entrance Project

We have been cordially invited to the Official Opening of the Holt Park Entrance Project on Friday 27th April, which we have been involved in.  A piece of land opposite the Cookridge Methodist Church on the Holt Park Estate has been landscaped with a new bench and pathways.  Cookridge Primary has been involved with planting hundreds of bulbs (yes, another bulb planting project by us) of snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells, and Class 9 have been working on a design for a gateway with a community artist as well as researching information about local wildlife for an information board, which will also be located in the area. It is a vast improvement already, but with these other little touches, it will be a lovely area for the local residents of Holt Park and Cookridge.  Can't wait for it to be finished!