Six Trees and Six Flowers

What’s it all about?

If children are to learn to ‘see’ the trees and wildflowers around them, they need to come into contact with them little and often, as well as by having focussed teaching.

‘6 Trees & 6 Flowers’ is an exploratory project that will allow teachers to revisit the subject of local trees and flowers even while the focus of their teaching is on something else. If this light-touch approach is successful, it will help to realise the potential of the decade of tree planting that the children and their schools are already involved with.

Although now an annual event in the Andover school calendar, we are aware that the planting of trees, is often an ’afterthought’ and opportunities for teaching and learning can be missed. In June 2017, with half the planting completed and 5 years left to go, we invited our partner schools to work with us over the remaining years to co-develop programmes that would help realise the potential of our work. Six schools with children aged 4 to 16 have risen to the challenge.

A shared aim is for all children leaving primary school to be able to recognise and name 6 British native trees and 6 local wildflowers, to be reinforced in secondary schools. Supported not only by environmental experts and gardeners but also by local musicians, storytellers, visual artists, crafters, writers and performers, teachers from the six schools will work with us to devise and trial projects that we hope will realise this aim whilst connecting children to nature practically, creatively and inspirationally.

Projects on offer include:

The visual arts: landart, drawing, sculpture, embroidery, batik, fabrics & dyes from plants
The performance arts: music, poetry & prose, story, dance
The sciences, design & technology: growing from a seed to a plant, manufacturing processes from plant to product, climate change and the role of trees in mitigation, sustainable forestry
The global context: exploring the impacts of a changing world on minority cultures in NW Vietnam