Featured School - Ravenscote Community Junior School

Ravenscote Pond And Gardening Association

We have been working on our pond and garden at Ravenscote for the last couple of months. Both areas had been neglected for the last two years as our learning had faced so much interruption.

Now that we are back at school properly, we have been working hard to create a nice environment for the wildlife and other children to enjoy.

Here are some of our projects:

Garden

The garden was full of weeds and all of the old raised beds had rotted, so we replaced them using palettes that the photocopy paper is delivered on. Of course, we had help from an adult for this part.

After cleaning the area up and removing all of the weeds, we started to think about what plants we would grow. In our garden we have planted vegetables such as: lettuces, carrots, tomatoes, sweet corn, onions, potatoes, rhubarb and broad beans. We have also been planting other things like sweet peas, sunflowers, wildflowers, mint and rosemary.

Pond

Our pond has been a big project for us.  It was in a really bad state, and we have spent a long time cleaning out algae, rubbish and various other things that have been thrown into it. There was an old, weed filled area that we transformed into a beautiful rock garden for nature to thrive. There is a small stone structure that is for foxes or other animals like hedgehogs.

In our pond we have planted oxygenator plants to make the water clearer so we can see the wildlife like frogs, tadpoles and newts. We have filmed some of the newts in the pond and also a frog that came to visit. The whole school has been very excited to see two ducks who have become regular visitors to our pond, since we have cleaned it up.

We also had an old scruffy, run-down wooden shed.  Now we have a new, tidy shed to store our handy tools that have helped us transform the pond into a wildlife welcoming sensation.

What’s Next

We hope that the food that we are growing in our garden will be used in our summer school meals. We plan to harvest it and cook ourselves lunch one day.

We will be building various things for the wildlife around the school, like bat and bird boxes, as well as places for bees and butterflies. We have sown some wildflower seeds in the pond area which we hope will grow well and be nice for insects.

Now that the pond is slowly being filled with plants, we are going to use it as a learning resource for our science, art and forest schools’ lessons.  We hope this inspires other schools to create and transform environmental areas of their own.

Hannah, Mia, Isla and Abby

For more on the Ravenscote hard working team, please click here