Diary Entry - May

A great moment came this month when a couple of our youngest children arrived at my classroom door bearing gifts: peas in a pod to taste.  Their delight was obvious – and the peas were delicious. 

Our garden is working now!  Each class has its own plot to tend.  Vegetables are growing and plans are in place for the autumn, and freshly-planted tubs cheer up the entrance to the school.  The Green Team are even about to plant a swamp area, which should attract wildlife but deter cats.  Exeter Road feels more like a school with outdoor opportunities for learning, and those opportunities are already being used by all.

So, what about the greenhouses?  Far from being forgotten, production is now in full swing on the panels needed for our full-size greenhouse.  Having taken a design idea from the children – using square panels of nine CD cases glued into a wooden frame – we are now embarked on building it.  Year Six wrote to a number of local businesses, after brainstorming the names of those that might have CD cases to spare, and posters went up in town.  Boxes of CD cases soon began to arrive.  In fact, it took only a couple of weeks to reach a thousand – our target number.  But we do have a hundred panels to make! 

Over the last few weeks of term, our classrooms will become hives of industry as these panels are put together by groups, both separate and mixed-age.  And, of course, our sterling STEM Ambassador Rodney Battey will continue to be on hand to help oversee the process.  The aim is for a full-size greenhouse to be ready for use in the spring.  Jewsons have kindly donated timber for the frame and, thanks to local paint supplier Wilson’s, it’s even going to be white!

The impact of the project on the teaching of Science and Design Technology has been significant, despite coming at a time of radical change to our curriculum.  Children have learned about adhesives, materials and the strengthening of structures.  They have been encouraged to be creative, to design tests and to improve a prototype – all within a context they can understand.  It’s a genuine need, a greenhouse for the school, but the business of building one brought up countless problems for them to solve – countless questions.  Where is the best place to put it? – gave an opportunity to study shadows and the movement of the Earth around the Sun.  What is the best temperature for plants to grow well? led to the question of how How can you control the temperature inside a greenhouse? and even the concept of solar gain. 

I’d put a Carl Sagan quote above a display of photographs in the corridor showing children enjoying all aspects of science: “We can do science, and with it we can improve our lives.”  I believe this project has given children an insight into the truth behind this statement.  Science can improve lives: more successful crops, safer structures and so on.  But they’ve also been given an insight into how even the largest project starts from a simple idea: The Eden Project, obviously, was one example; but our own greenhouse is another, as we scale up and produce the panels for it on an industrial scale. 

And this all started with a small pile of CD cases and one child in a group who noticed how easily a hinge snapped off... 

Robin James

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