Wilder School - Northfield St Nicholas Primary Academy

Today was our first Wilder Schools visit to Northfield St Nicholas primary school. The school has quite a lot of outdoor space, but has a particular area that they’d like to develop into a wildlife area that can be used for outdoor learning.

We began with an assembly for the whole school, introducing them to Wilder Schools and the work that we will be doing with them. We then began work with year 2. We carried out a nature connection survey with the children and then they drew pictures of how they see the school grounds and what’s important to them in the outside space.

We then did some outdoor maths! We measured the playground and hedgerows, using strides as our unit of measurement, and counted the number of trees and recorded any bird boxes or other nest boxes that are already present. We also did some leaf rubbings, which helped us to identify which trees are growing in the playground; we found oak and ash, amongst others!

Our second day with year 2 and we started off by discovering the wildlife that already calls the school grounds home. We did some minibeast hunting in the proposed new wildlife area and found plenty of spiders, and a giant grub hiding in a rotten tree stump (we made sure we carefully returned it to where we found it after having a good look).

After this we explored the potential for attracting other wildlife into the school grounds by learning about the needs of different animals and deciding if we could provide for some of these things. We decided there was lots of scope for creating some great leaf piles and even a compost heap that might attract slow worms! The school is right next door to some allotments and a churchyard, so there’s a lot of potential for wildlife to move in from either of these areas.

The children then drew pictures of all the changes that they’d like to make to improve the grounds for wildlife; attracting Hedgehogs seemed pretty high up the priority list!

On Day 3 we did some research into what we might need to make the minibeast homes and habitats we want to create in the wildlife area. The children came up with lots of ideas of what makes good habitats for invertebrates. We then planned the fundraising event they would do to raise money for these materials. The consensus was overwhelmingly a cake sale! They designed posters for the cake sale and to explain to the rest of the school what we are raising money for. 

Day 4 was the day of the cake sale! But before setting up the cake sale we did a whole session about birds. Why they are important, how you can recognise different bird species by their looks or songs and how different birds make their nests. We then finished the session by making pinecone bird feeders to hang up in the school grounds to encourage the birds. The children loved getting stuck in to this. The next time I went to the school, all the bird seed had gone so the feeders were obviously very popular! 

Then that afternoon during their parents evening we ran the cake sale. This gave us the opportunity to talk to some of the parents about the Wilder Schools project. Everyone enjoyed their cake. 

This time we did lots of activities all about trees. We wanted the children to explore the different trees in their school grounds and understand why they're important. We started off by creating our own "trees" decorated with all the reasons why we need and appreciate trees. They had no trouble coming up with lots of ideas. We then went outside, had a go at identifying some tree species, measuring and exploring the trees. 

Day 6 of our Wilder Schools project and we starting doing some school ground improvements. The school have been generously donated lots of resources to use included lots of trees. So that the children knew how to look after any trees and flowers they plant we started off with some activities looking at what plants need in order to grow. We then started the planting! We put in some fruit trees to create a mindful sheltered area within the wildlife area. We also added to the hedgerow line already in the school by adding some hawthorn, rowan and hazel trees. The children were really good at doing the planting carefully and thinking about where the best place to put the trees was. A lot of it was because they enjoyed the digging and finding all the worms in the soil. 

We had our first twilight teacher training session to help the teachers gain the confidence to take lessons outside. The team decided it would be useful to see how they could take the core subjects such as maths, English and science outside. We started the session by going around the room with everyone marking out of ten how they feel about outdoor learning. It was great to hear mostly high numbers with everyone very keen on it but some with some worries and concerns. We spoke through the benefits of outdoor learning what we have already done as part of the Wilder Schools project. We then went through a variety of activities and types of learning that work well outside. It was great to see everyone get involved, especially with sharing ideas of which lessons could be taken outside. 

As part of Wilder Schools, the children  come on a school trip to one of Suffolk Wildlife Trust's nature reserves.

Year 2 enjoyed getting out of the classroom and spending the day at Carlton Marshes. They did dyke dipping, invertebrate hunting and explored the wildlife on the reserve on a nature walk. The nature walk became quite interesting for one of the groups as they had to do a slight detour when came across two families of swans with cygnets. It's safe to say the males where being very protective of their young! 

Nevertheless, a great day was had by all. 

Today was the day that all of the plans became a reality. This was our big action day where we made the improvements to the wildlife area such us creating a magnificent minibeast hotel, planted tyres with nectar rich plants and filled planted with tomatoes and beans that the children can look after and watch grow. The children enjoyed searching for resources already in the school grounds that could help with these projects such as sticks and lots of pinecones for the minibeast hotel! We also found some pieces of wood that were destined to be disposed of but we rescued them and created a log pile. It shows that you don't need to spend lots of money getting resources for a wildlife area!

We were very happy with the results and hopefully the wildlife will be happy with it too. We also had a look at the trees we planted a few weeks ago and gave them a much needed water, but they seemed to be growing really well. 

After all the hard work of creating the wildlife area we had our last twilight teacher training session. It was great to be able to take the other teaching staff to see the improvements we had made and show them how they could use the area with their classes. We also discussed coming up with a school charter of expectations when using the wildlife area to ensure that it stays as a safe and suitable environment for wildlife. 

We had some time for the teachers to feedback on any outdoor learning sessions they had delivered and on the whole they were overwhelmingly positive with the teachers saying the children loved it and seemed to retain the information they had learnt outside really well. We then went through a few geography activities that could be taught outside such as learning to use a compass, mapping skills and seeing the difference between man-made and natural materials as these are all topics that work so well in an outdoor environment. We finished the session by discussing National or International days that could be incorporated into outdoor learning such as International Mud Day (which the EYFS teachers were particularly keen on!) and World Environment Day. Acknowledging these days provides an opportunity to raise awareness for different projects and campaigns as well as adding some more interest to lessons. 

It was the final day with Year 2 so we reflected on changes and progress we had made over the year. On the first visit to Northfield we measured and recorded what was already in their school grounds, so in this session we remeasured and counted how many more trees, pollinator pit stops, animal homes etc. there were to see the improvements. We then did a massive bug hunt to see what species where enjoying the newly improved wildlife area. The children between them found the full life cycle of a ladybird, which even the teachers had never seen before! We finished the day by redoing the nature connection survey to see how the children were feeling about outdoor learning and nature in general. It was good to see more of the children feeling very positive about being outside, seeing beauty in nature and feeling that outdoor learning is important to them. 

We have had a great year working together with Northfield St. Nicholas and it is exciting to see how the wildlife area continues to develop.