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Educators
Specialist Design
As trained teachers we understand the needs of both staff room and classroom. As experienced landscape designers we know how to interpret your needs; natural play activities support reading, writing, maths and science programmes.
Workshops
As well as the usual Grounds for Learning and natural play related topics we run workshops for teachers and community groups on orchard design (fruit tree varieties, rootstocks, spacing).
Workshop topics include:
- Materials needed
- Why plant
- How to plant an orchard
- Where to plant
- How to involve children and adults
- Local fruit varieties
- Curriculum links
If you are interested in attending or hosting a workshop, please Contact Us for details. We can come to you or you can travel to us!
See our case studies for further ideas
Design for Educational environments
We work with schools and Early Years settings to create natural play areas, communal spaces for after-hours community gatherings, growing areas for in school and community use. Creative curricula demand a creative use of your space.
We work with schools to increase awareness of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Outdoor, experiential learning opportunities engage, stimulate and encourage high aspirations. Sustainable schools, edible garden design & community garden schemes teach the link between healthy food and the environment. School playgrounds can be an extension of the classroom, a space to feel inspired to create or perform poetry or dramatic pieces, observe the wonder of science in action or simply a place to unwind. "There is nothing so lovely as lying under an apple tree in blossom, breathing in the fragrant air, staring up through the leaves to clouds flitting across a blue sky on a warm spring day. When planned as part of an outdoor classroom design, or a school sensory garden the edible gardens enrich the curriculum. " Chris, Southampton School gardens, natural playgrounds and outdoor classrooms have been re-gaining importance for over 10 years.
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- Ofsted’s October 2008 report evaluates the importance of learning outside the classroom and demonstrates that high quality learning outside the classroom is a significant factor in raising standards and improving personal development.
We are a "go to resource" for SEN outdoor learning provision. Our special Educational Needs school gardens designs ensure that plants and materials are non toxic and preferably edible as students may put things in their mouths. In a sensory garden, edible plants make the taste sensation come alive. Through discovery in a sensory garden setting knowledge can be transferred to more natural settings.
Edible gardens can be designed as part of special needs gardens, sensory gardens, or simply espaliered along the tennis court fence! They are an important part of natural play, work well with outdoor classroom design, and are an essential component of school sensory garden design. Children who learn to safely eat ‘wild foods’ develop an appreciation for the natural landscape. Blackberries come from bramble patches, not plastic wrapped supermarket containers! Early Years to senior STEM students develop deep connections with and an appreciation for the natural landscape. Natural play using edible plantings encourages children to experiment with the world around them.
Cost efficient LOTC programmes are facilitated through appropriately-designed school grounds developments.
Vacant growing space is all around us. If you are on a tight site and do not have land within your grounds, check out Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Landshare scheme . You can register as an individual looking for land, as someone keen to grow things, someone with land that you could share with another group, or as someone who can facilitate the process locally. Remember roof tops can provide room to grow, and walls can have plants grown up or down them as well as hanging space. Fruit and vegetables don't need to grow on the ground.
Edible gardens can be designed as part of special needs gardens, sensory gardens, or simply espaliered along the tennis court fence! They are an important part of natural play, work well with outdoor classroom design, and are an essential component of school sensory garden design.
Creative Sustainable Design
We can help with Inspiration for your edible garden, to enhance natural play or a special needs sensory garden. Take the ideas presented here and imagine your own space. Look closely at your grounds and think,"Yes I could use that space. We could have a story telling area, a home-school partnership programme with outdoor drama, or even grow fresh fruit and vegetables to feed our school community."
Sensory gardens need to do more than provide a smelly leaf and colourful flower. They must engage all the senses, providing stimuli for all parts of the student’s young, growing body. Sand and water play offers tactile stimulation which together with measuring and pouring adds depth to maths lessons.
Planning your school grounds project?
There are 3 steps to a successful project
- Canvas the ideas and opinions of staff, students and the local community, then appoint someone to pull all the ideas together. Greenstone Design's effective stakeholder engagement and community consultation process allows valuable teacher staff time to be spent on school matters.
- Develop an overall plan. This document details the concept, scaled drawings of the site including services, and specifies the materials to be used. A planting and maintenance plan is an essential part of the playscape design process. We can produce a complete development master plan, to be achieved over 2, 5 or 10 years, as time and funds become available, or a simple outline plan, designed to be installed by community labour, or approved contractors.
- Funding can come from your local authority or any number of community and environmental grants (Note: grants will generally pay for the designer's fees as a direct cost of the project ) Please contact us for help with the design of your new community garden or grounds project .
To see projects we have worked on and ideas for future developments, please click here. To contact us to work with you and your students to design any part, or the whole, of your school grounds please click here
Watch the short video below to see and hear more about the potential of your grounds.
Example
As an example of how school grounds aid an infant & nursery school in Berkshire:
"We use our grounds for practical learning about the seed-to-seed cycle. We plant willow wherever it will grow and harvest it for projects around the school and to make baskets in design technology. In Spring, the children gather the daffodils they planted the previous Autumn to honour their mothers for Mothering Sunday. They have earned this right by collecting the bulbs on shopping trips to the local garden centre, using them for maths work and then planting them. Each child learns how to pick responsibly, and what is safe to touch and which plants are best left alone. We feel It is important to offer the children the environment where they can make these distinctions, not to attempt to remove everything that appears to be harmful, but to show the children how to recognise plants and their properties.
We have planted traditional healing plants such as willow, comfrey and feverfew and wherever the stinging nettle grows, the soothing dock leaf is nearby. Dandelions and daisies spread across the field in a carpet of white and yellow - afford opportunities for art, creative writing, and numeracy as we estimate how many in a given area, to observe how they open and close with the heat and cool of the day for science, to collect and press for DT and for daisy chains, to enjoy what many gardeners might dismiss as a troublesome weed."
"We use our grounds for practical learning about the seed-to-seed cycle. We plant willow wherever it will grow and harvest it for projects around the school and to make baskets in design technology. In Spring, the children gather the daffodils they planted the previous Autumn to honour their mothers for Mothering Sunday. They have earned this right by collecting the bulbs on shopping trips to the local garden centre, using them for maths work and then planting them. Each child learns how to pick responsibly, and what is safe to touch and which plants are best left alone. We feel It is important to offer the children the environment where they can make these distinctions, not to attempt to remove everything that appears to be harmful, but to show the children how to recognise plants and their properties.
We have planted traditional healing plants such as willow, comfrey and feverfew and wherever the stinging nettle grows, the soothing dock leaf is nearby. Dandelions and daisies spread across the field in a carpet of white and yellow - afford opportunities for art, creative writing, and numeracy as we estimate how many in a given area, to observe how they open and close with the heat and cool of the day for science, to collect and press for DT and for daisy chains, to enjoy what many gardeners might dismiss as a troublesome weed."
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Based on the Surrey-Hampshire border we work locally, nationally and internationally to advise and design gardens for health and well-being