Wilder School - Kingsfleet Primary

We presented our Wilder Schools programme in a whole school assembly. It was great to chat to children from Reception up to year 6 about their animal encounters and what they’ve already been doing at home to make space for wildlife in their gardens. It was brilliant to meet some teachers too and get the ball rolling. There is so much enthusiasm for the project already and the school grounds have huge potential.

We began our work with year 5 to find out how connected they feel to nature, and to map the school grounds for different habitats. They had a great time drawing baseline maps of the school from memory and then going outside to measure and count all the different habitat features, from hedgerows, trees and woodland areas, to grassy fields and shrubby paths. We counted log piles and bird boxes, and started to think about what we’d like to do around the site. A great start to making Kingsfleet a wilder school!

Today we met with Year 5 in the morning and year 4 in the afternoon!

The aim of the sessions today was to start thinking about projects we could put into action over the year. We once again went outside and looked at where year 5 had mapped previously and brainstormed ideas for wildlife. The children played a game where they became different species and asessed how well their school grounds was adapted for the animals. We then came together discussed what we had found and came up with three starting ideas:

1. Bug hotel

2. Wild flower strip

3. Stag beetle piles

The second half of the day we spent with both year 4 and year 5 thinking of how we could fundraise for these projects. Some brilliant ideas were suggested including sponsored litter picks, selling bee rescue juice, bake sales, art events and more! 

Since February KingsFleet have been busy collecting materials to build a bug hotel in their wildlife area.  Today our engagement officer Sophie and our Foxburrow Intern Mel went to see how they had been getting on and put it into action! 

The children were brilliant at collecting and clearing the wildlife area of any "junk" and rubbish and having a really good clear out.  Next year 5 built the bug hotel and stuffed it full of materials including sticks, pinecones, plant pots, broken tiles, plastic bottles filled with bamboo, straw and stones. We used pallets for the structure and bricks in between for height. Year 4 then helped in the afternoon to finish stuffing every nook and cranny and gave it a living wildflower roof.

We even had time to create 3 large log piles and 2 stag beetle stacks! 

This area is really starting to come together, and we spoke about " wildlife promises" we could make to make sure the area is looked after in the future!

As part of Kingsfleet's summer celebration we had a stall potting sunflowers using paper potters. Our learning officer planted over 45 sunflowers for the children to take home and grow. They had lots of conversations with the parents about what the children had been doing in the wildlife area and how they can get involved at the school and at home.

Lots of fun was had by all the pupils! 

Kingsfleet teachers had their PD Day with us at Foxburrow. This time the teachers came to us rather than us going to them and we got to give them a mini crash course in outdoor learning. We looked at how we can bring the whole curriculum to the outdoors as well as focusing on I.D skills and activities they could take back to school. 

Some brilliant ideas were formulated, some of which were tested that week at school! 

We returned to Kingsfleet to see how they were doing maintaining the wildlife area. We were really pleased to see it well looked after. Unfortunately, one of the stag beetle stacks had fallen over but they actioned the groundskeeper to fix this and some children to create a sign explaining why we don't climb on it.

We also re did our nature connection surveys with some very positive results and re-measured the areas around the school.  Going forward we still have plans to add a wildflower strip hopefully next year.