Year 4 Get Gardening at Kew

"After a year's planning and discussion with the education and horticulture departments of Kew Gardens, we were very excited to embark on a unique collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This is initially planned as a three year project enabling children to garden in Kew for the first time with our own allotment, and to get Kew's help to design and maintain our own school garden to benefit the whole school. For Broomfield this is a marvellous opportunity to benefit from pioneering work teaching children about science through practical gardening activities backed up with specialist science lab experience. For the science education community, we are helping to fill a gap in knowledge, recently identified by King's College, London and the National Foundation for Education Research, of how children grow in scientific understanding through long term practical study within a botanical garden or other scientific institution.
  
Our first visit introduced us to different soil types, our allotment, using microscopes and thinking about habitats as well as the horticultural and education staff. We met Stewart Henchie of Kew's horticulture department who has helped us brilliantly grow our plants on the allotment. We also met Derek Swann and Louise Cross of Kew's education team who have worked with us in the Kew science classrooms teaching us on each visit.

Our next visit in March was very dramatic as we dodged hail stones and thunder storms in between planting radishes and potatoes. We also continued to monitor the changing plants blooming in Kew each month and learned all about germination and seeds. Since then we have planted a range of vegetables including carrots, tomatoes, radishes, lettuce and beetroot which we hope to harvest on our final visit to Kew this year in July.
  
This has been a great start to our collaboration with Kew. Many thanks to our teachers and all the Kew staff for making this possible."

Report on Kew project by Mr York in 2004.

Since this report was written two more Year 4 classes have benefitted from our collaboration with Kew. We have now established our children's garden at Broomfield and we are using our friends at Kew's advice on how best to develop this as a learning and gardening resource. It has already produced enough potatoes to feed the school three times, as well as a host of other vegetables, and with the support of the PTA we expect to be able to introduce some of the laboratory type teaching that we have enjoyed at Kew to all our classes in our own Green Room with the purchase of new microscopes ready for the start of the year in September 2006.