Redwell Primary School

Kagin’s Redwell Kingdom

Earlier this year, a confused alien called Kagin landed in our school grounds. He didn’t know anything about Redwell when he landed. He was very scared and he didn’t have anywhere to go. Since he didn’t understand our language, we built a garden for him, telling him the story of Redwell, so that he understands where he is.

Bees and reused footballs

Kagin enjoys the garden

So many tasty things here

At the back of the garden, the squirrel obstacle course that we have put in represents our trim trail. The four colours of the palette at the back represent our four houses – Red Rowan, Blue Willow, Green Elder and Yellow Oak. The yellow, green and purple colours at the bottom of the garden represent our three wing colours. We used plastic water bottles to make bees because we have red tailed bumblebees here at Redwell. We made a bug hotel to provide a home for insects and other minibeasts. We have planted flowers in a tyre as we enjoy playing with tyres at break and lunchtimes. We have created a bee bath in the style of the water sculpture that we have in our grounds. Our school badge is a red well, so we have made one of our own and planted it with pond plants. We have created hanging baskets from old footballs, which we have planted with strawberries. There is a bird house at the back of the garden, which we have stuffed with leaves and twigs from the trees in our grounds.

Kagin himself is in the middle of the garden, so he can see and learn all about the story of Redwell. We are very proud of our school and its grounds and we wanted to share this story with you.

Our garden is wildlife friendly because it has a bird house and a bug hotel for wildlife to hide in. It also has a pond for aquatic animals such as frogs and newts. We created a bee bath so that the bees can drink from shallow water if they get thirsty. We planted some flowering plants for insects to feed from.

Nearly all of our garden is edible! We planted blackberries at the back of the garden which will fruit in the autumn. There are herbs planted along the bottom of the garden which humans and animals will like to eat. We planted strawberries in our hanging baskets for people and birds to eat. We have added leaves and wood for detritivores to eat. We planted wild flowers such as dandelions and buttercups for insects.

Most of the materials used to build our garden were reused. The hanging baskets are made from punctured footballs that would otherwise be thrown away. The pallets came into school with an order of equipment. The plastic bottles to make the bees came from our recycling. The bucket for the well was found in school (it used to be our classroom bin!) We found the wood to make the insect hotel as it was left in our garden area. We luckily found a piece of metal whilst we were litter picking that we reused as a hook for the hanging baskets.

A member of our community kindly donated the strawberry plants that we used and children from our class brought in plants from their own gardens. We also gathered wild flowers from the grounds around Redwell.

When we built our garden, we had help from several parents who gave up their time to help us. We also had the STEM lead from Clackmannanshire Council who came to help us use tools safely when we built our garden.

We are lucky that our garden can stay where it is and we are interested to watch it grow and mature. We have already seen lots of changes since we planted it, such as bugs moving into the Bug Hotel, the plants in the tyres are growing and flowering, there are worms living in the soil and the plants in the Red Well are thriving. We are looking forward to seeing the plants fruit and noticing which creatures come to visit it over the year. We plan to use the herbs in our cooking over the next session.

We are really proud of how we have worked together to build our garden. We have learned how to transplant plants carefully, how to plant seeds, how to use tools safely, that is fun to work as a team and that sometimes it doesn’t go right first time and we can learn from our mistakes. We have all had lots of fun!