Whinhill Primary School

A Celebration of Languages and Cultures at Whinhill

Our garden celebrates the many languages and cultures in our school. We have around 16 different languages spoken to different degrees by children who either have parents of different nationalities, or who are from our many new Scots families. We also have a Gaelic unit within the school. Our team are from P3 and 4 and their languages are Ukrainian, Russian, Farsi and Dari. They were an absolute joy to work with, so keen and enthusiastic about growing things. Language was no barrier.

Repurposed poly-bag flowers

Helpful gnome

Sacking pot holders

We sowed vegetable seeds (spinach, Swiss chard, peas) and flower seeds (marigolds, sunflowers, cerinthe) and divided some of the plants already in the school garden for herbs and strawberries and other flowers. We used pallets from our saved stack of used ones (with thanks to our janitor for doing some joinery work on them) and we re-used sacking pot-holders we made last year. We gathered old wood, fallen branches and pine-cones, filled old plant-pots and put them in fruit crates for our bug hotel.

We realized that we weren’t going to have flowers out in time, thanks to the cold weather so to add some colour, the team made flowers from recycled poly-bags. We added a carton of water for the bees, and to highlight all our many languages, we asked the children in whose homes these were spoken, to write down the name of the language and decorate around it. We pinned these on our garden wall.

One of our EAL teachers knitted the lovely garden gnome and he looks after the small pebble garden which has sempervivum babies that all came from a plant that was a gift several years ago. I hope that you can see from the photos how much fun we had.

The children are irrepressible and we are incredibly proud of them. Our garden will remain at the front of the school.

Garden Design