Extraordinary Gardeners Sum1 2025
Extraordinary Gardeners
Summer 1 2025
Science, English and Art
DT and Geography
Thinking and Independence
RATIONALE:
Inspired by their trip to Wisley and their parcel from Joe, children decide to learn about plants, how they grow and how to look after them. The school garden will be the ideal place to become extraordinary gardeners ourselves, Joe will set the children challenges via the ‘Apple Tree Display’ and they can answer him by writing on leaves with what they find out. They will tell him how to identify and name common plants and trees, explain the structure of a plant, introduce the life cycle of a bean, look at how plants are suited to their habitat and find out why plants need light, water and warmth to grow. The children will show us all what they have learnt by looking after and planting out the school garden. Back in the classroom they will write descriptions of the extraordinary parts of Wisley and explore narratives (Jack and the beanstalk). The children will also show Joe the beauty of plants and flowers by learning to sketch and use colour inspired by famous artist such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Van Gogh. This will all culminate in a garden party!
Hook:
Visit to RHS Wisley – the children are presented with a parcel from Joe the extraordinary gardener. It contains the story of his garden, gardening objects and a challenge for the children to transform the school garden into their own extraordinary garden.
Joe’s first question: Are there different types of plants and trees? Emerald Class set about trying to find out about different types of plants and trees. We look at sorting wild and garden plant, deciduous and evergreen trees, followed by drawing and labelling the parts of a plant and tree.
Joe’s second question - are seeds and bulbs the same? How does a plant grow? We explored seeds and bulbs looking at the lifecycle of a runnerbean and a daffodil. We each planted a runnerbean seed and we also planted three daffodil bulbs to see what happens!
Did you know that a famous artist called Van Gogh painted a beautiful picture of sunflowers? We looked really closely at his painting and then created our own. We felt like real artist as we were very quiet, listened to music and had a focused afternoon of painting! The pictures are fabulous!
Our runnerbean seeds have started to grow! This is called germination.
Watching our beans grow!
Art inspired by Van Gogh and Georgia O’keeffe.
Preparing our garden and planting!
Our garden party! We invited our families to join us to celebrate all our learning as “Extraordinary gardeners”. Our fantastic home learning garden themed cakes and biscuits were enjoyed by all. At school we designed and made fruit cocktails and flowers shaped fruit snacks. Our families shared our wonderful writing and creative art work. We also showed everyone all the flowers and vegetables that are now growing in our garden. A huge thank you to everyone for coming to celebrate our project.
