Blenheim Palace Flower Show 2014

As our first Blackbird Academy Trust collaborative Outdoor Learning project we aimed high by designing and building a show garden for Blenheim Palace Flower Show. Our theme was 'Eat your Garden' and it was filled with edible plants and veg in our chosen colour scheme of purple and orange. These included red cabbage, purple basil, french beans, radiccio, chives beetroot and bright orange marigolds. We also had a garlic theme to promote our Garlic Farm project (with freshly harvested elephant garlic). The children were involved at every stage of looking after the plants, researching information and promotional materials, constructing the garden and welcoming visitors.

See how we built the garden in this video; Blenheim Palace Flower Show - Tuesday! - YouTube

On every show day we had teams of children from each school explaining the design and providing information about the plants. All the hard work paid off and we were thrilled to receive a gold award for garden design from Monty Don!

Read what the Oxford Mail said about the project.

Roman shields

Year 3 have been learning about the Romans, so we have been exploring how the roman army managed to win so many battles. We have practiced javelin throwing, sword fighting and even made some roman shields. We learnt how to march in the tortoise formation, which protected the soldiers from arrows and missiles.

 

Digging rivers

To link to their River topic, year 4 have been making miniature flowing river diagrams. They included features like meanders, source and tributaries by carving them into a hill. We tested them by pouring water from the top and seeing if it made it to the mouth.

 

The shelters

We are in in year 5.

We made some shelters with ropes and sticks.

We all were in a team.

We all worked together.

We had hot chocolate in the shelters.

We all looked each other's shelters.

By tianna

 

Woodland windows

Year 3 have been reading Jeannie Baker's book, 'Window' in class. In Outdoor learning we have been following this up by making our own window frames by lashing sticks together.

                                                                                               

 Then we tried to recreate the view from our own bedroom windows (after sketching it out). We used all natural materials found in he woods including sticks, leaves and grass, with some spectacular results.

Mud glorious mud.

 

Since Christmas the rain has been relentless. As you can see from the sorry state of the chicken run, the mud has taken over our outside spaces; fun for splashing in puddles but the chicks don't seem to appreciate that!

 

 

Luckily the Council parks service helped us out by delivering a truckload of fresh woodchippings. The Year 5s shoveled and raked it all over the muddy paths and made it look lovely again!

 

Bench update!

After weeks of sawing, drilling, whittling, and sanding we have finally got some of the Year 6 benches finished! We'll done for all your hard work. We will be using some of them in our outdoor classroom and might sell some, if they pass our rigorous safety testing.