It's stopped raining!!!!

Yes! It stopped raining long enough for us to get out into the garden - though the heavens opened at 3pm and drenched everybody at going home time!

The sun actually popped out from behind the somewhat menacing clouds and shone on us with quite a bit of warmth.  We split the children up between sowing seeds and some pond dipping which they loved.

With our pond due for a revamp, Mrs Whitley and I had a bit of a poke into the murky depths and were pleasantly surprised to see water creatures swimming!  So at lunchtime, I headed home and grabbed one of our seaside fishing nets and in the afternoon, we supervised the children with a spot of pond dipping.  The children were fascinated and with a quickly printed off identification sheet, the children discovered that we had snails, water lice and small worms in our pond.  Our poor pond never got quite finished, a job too big for Mrs Whitley and I, and too expensive to remedy with contractors.  Filling up with unsightly pond weed and wind blown rubbish, we wondered how we could solve our problem.  Then, Interserve, the contractors for the new Holt Park Well Being Centre stepped forward and have offered to sort out our pond and wildlife area, free of charge!  We can't thank them enough and are hoping to see them in our garden in the next couple of weeks!  In the meantime, we will invest in proper trays and pond dipping nets and then will be able to to do the job properly!  Anyway, it was lovely to have a dummy run with the children and remedy any issues that we might have!  We just can't wait.

Our diligent watering of the Easter holidays (thank you Mrs W for bearing the brunt of the watering rota) saw our seedlings germinate and grow steadily, though our up and down weather isn't helping. When the sun is out, it's very warm and springlike, but we have suffered some quite sharp frosts and even snow over the last couple of weeks.  With the polytunnel unheated, our poor seedlings haven't had the best of starts, but we are doing well.

We welcomed Rachel Morgan on to our team this Friday.  She came to the Wednesday afternoon adult garden  session and offered to help out with our children's rota. Rachel was brilliant and it felt that she had been with us for ages - she was so comfortable.  We haven't scared her off and she's kindly offered her services every Friday which is a great help as I sometimes can be asked to help out in other parts of the school having to cry off the gardening and leave Mrs W on her own.  Hopefully, we will be able to expand on the adults and have a little dedicated team helping with the children.  If you would like to help out, you know who to call...........!

Next Friday, we are all off to the Holt Park Entrance Project Opening Ceremony.  With seven children who live on the estate, we have been re-developing a little plot of land after being invited by the Holt Park Resident's Association to partake. Our little team, better known as the Holt Park Seven, listed the animals who might live there, noted the different type of trees and spent a very rainy, windy and ultimately muddy afternoon planting bulbs of snowdrops and bluebells!  It say we were got wet is a bit of an understatement! Class 9 worked with Chris Campbell, a community artist and developed some metal work animals that are now on display on the site and now it is ready for its official opening next Friday. So we will be walking down from school to watch the cutting of the ribbon by our local MP, Greg Mulholland before having refreshments at the Leisure Centre.  I will fill you in with more details this time next week!