Restoring the Earth

I’ve written about trees quite a few times on my blog so you are probably aware by now that I consider them to be quite important and that I am probably a tree hugger!

Well trees are very important. Not only do they have a significant impact on our environment (the climate, soil, habitat for other living creatures, etc) they are important for our well being in other ways. Here are some of the things I find important about trees:tree

  • being able to touch a living thing that is many times older than us
  • watching the season of life and death as leaves die and are recycled to feed the tree and other plants
  • experiencing the cool shade on a hot day
  • sheltering from the wind and rain in a storm
  • lying back under a tree and looking up through the branches and leaves towards the infinity above.

These things, and more, help trees to enrich our lives. And yet many of our children don’t have much opportunity to learn and experience trees in our busy curriculum.

So why don’t we grow more trees in schools and help to plant them out into our neighbourhood?

ERS (Earth Restoration Service) aim to help schools do just this, and more. They can provide schools with tree saplings for the school to make their own tree nursery. Then, when the saplings are strong enough they can take the saplings out into the community to plant them. There is a huge amount of educational “stuff” that could be done connected with this project, if you are stuck for ideas read my other blog posts or contact me!

ERS also have other projects for schools and also work worldwide so why not see if your link school is interested in having their own tree nursery – you could compare notes and you may be finding a way to help them.

Trees and QR Codes

I have had an exciting day today working with a small group of year 5 and 6 pupils who have been left behind whilst their classmates have gone on a residential to Buckden. Readers will know that I have long wanted to get schools involved in tree audits so today we started one. We identified that we wanted to photograph the trees, their leaves and possibly their bark, that we wanted to measure their height and their age. We didn’t want to cut the trees down so we came up with a number of ways of estimating these. Data was collected whilst avoiding fox poo, frogs, brambles and the occasional drop of rain. A table was designed in a spreadsheet to do the calculations for us, databases and books searched to identify the trees and posts written to the class blog. Finally, we managed to create some QR codes to point to the class blog. These will be laminated and fastened to some of the trees. We also hope to further edit the blog to add more information as we research the trees.

We still have a long way to go as there are a lot more trees and information we can research but the pupils enjoyed themselves and hopefully learnt a lot. We also have a mystery tree so if you have the time do please please visit their blog and see if you can help or leave a comment.

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