Wilder School - Woodbridge School Prep

Wild Learning Officer Emma Keeble spent the morning at Woodbridge School prep, starting with an assembly to introduce the project to the whole school. Working with year 5, we started with a survey to ascertain how important nature is to the students. We created a human bar graph (photo above) to determine how connected to nature they feel- it was a graded scale with far left being unconnected, and right feeling that nature is vital to their life at present - nice to see the skew is to the right already with no one saying nature was unimportant to them!

We then asked them to map out their grounds. The school want to focus the project on their two ponds so we ran some experiments to assessing the water quality using indicator species. We found the cress pond to be of much poorer quality, only supporting species who can tolerate moderate water quality, whilst the more natural and free flowing pond on the other side of the drive was host to things like damselfly nymph and stonefly who are only found in very high quality water.  

We will be returning monthly over the next year to work with staff and students to make Woodbridge and even wilder school!

Our second visit to Woodbridge prep saw us taking to the grounds armed with tape measures and trundle wheels to measure the current areas and catalogue existing habitats. We also thought about what certain key species like stag beetles, swifts, hedgehogs and slow worms require in a habitat and made notes re the suitability of the grounds at present. This will help to inform our next session when we will start to plan what the students would like the grounds to look like to make Woodbridge prep a truly Wilder School

We spent the morning again with Year 5, assessing the suitability of the grounds for a number of different species. This led to some really interesting discussions about how we can improve the space for wildlife and how helping one species has a knock on effect in helping others too. We made a list of actions to improve the grounds for some key species and graded them with a traffic light system highlighting actions we thought were easily achievable, possibly achievable and non achievable. We were all really encouraged to find lots of green highlighting on the list and the children were really enthused to get going and make some positive changes for wildlife. 

We then spent the afternoon working with the reception children, learning about invertebrates and creating invertebrate homes in their gorgeous garden. We built log piles, sawed bamboo and carpet roll inners to stuff a crate and make an interim invertebrate home before we hope to build a more permanent one in the new year.

We also discovered that the school had done some fundraising of their own and organised a quizz evening to raise money to hire in a digger and dredge the sediment from one of their ponds to make it better for wildlife. Lovely to see how our visits are spreading across the wider school community!

We've been at Woodbridge school prep today for our Wilder schools project, creating our master plan, building bird boxes and creating not one but two invertebrate hotels! Its been great to actually start doing some practical tasks to make Woodbridge even Wilder. The year 5 students have a writing project coming up so they will be creating posters and letters to send out to parents and local garden centers asking for donations of items to help us make our vision a reality.

What a productive day! Back in the rather wet grounds today to realise their vision of a wilder school grounds! Year 5 today chose locations and put up bird boxes, cut down bamboo from the cress pond and trimmed it down to make invertebrate hotels, spread stone to make a reptile basking bank, scattered wildflower seed on the silt removed from the cress pond, painted hedgehog highways and make fat balls! Such an industrious group of youngsters!

What a wet and grey day today! Didn’t stop year 5 at Woodbridge prep school getting busy thinking of fundraising ideas to help them to realise their vision to make their grounds wilder.

We made recycled wildflower seeded paper ready to turn into Easter and Mother’s Day cards, made newspaper pots and planted seeds and made posters to advertise the wildflower cards sale next week. Good luck with the sale next week guys!!

This visit saw us planting up a bank beside the steps to the dinner hall with lavenders, salvia, feverfew and a variety of other species that are great for pollinators! T=It was lovely to hear the admiring comments from other children and staff members as they passed through the day who were all excited to see what would come up and how the area would change and become more vibrant with colour and life.

The wildlflower bank was looking glorious too!

We've been back to Woodbridge pre prep working with year five working hard on bringing their master plan for a wider school grounds into reality. Revisiting the plan we were super proud to see how much they had achieved: long grass areas created, bird boxes up, including 3 swift boxes, bird feeders out, a bee bank planted up and looking fab, cress pond cleared and looking much more healthy AND other members of the school enjoying and seeing the benefit of wilder areas- amazing work year 5.

We still have big plans for the autumn and early spring terms now but what a fantastic achievement! Today saw us building hedgehog homes, making a hedgehog ramp out of the pond, transplanting flag iris to create some emergent vegetation and making log piles. We also enjoyed a huge carpet of fluffy poplar seeds that looked like summer snow and made good fluff angels! Looking forward to going back next week to showcase all of this hard work to the rest of the school.

We had our last wilder school visit of the year today at Woodbridge prep. Super proud of the year 5's and all their achievements and that of their fantastically supportive staff.

Today was a great celebration of their achievements as they got the chance to share and explain all they have created and actioned with the years below them. They then worked with each year to carry out invertebrate hunts in the area of long grass to demonstrate how insect biodiversity has increased and how this in turn will support the birds including swifts that we hope will be attracted to the grounds.

One staff member even shared a sighting of a stag beetle in the grounds which haven't been seen on site before.

We ended the day by year 5 in effect handing the batten of responsibility down to the soon to be year 4's to continue their vision into next year. It's been a pleasure to help this inspiring group of young people to make such a difference to their grounds and we can't wait to see it improve still further next year!