Posted by SASTA

on 22/08/2024

With this year’s theme being Species Survival - More Than Just Sustainability, we chose to hold a whole school event dubbed, Pollinators’ Paradise!

This occurred during students’ regular science lessons but was a break on our scheduled learning, with a focus on rejuvenating our school gardens and encouraging pollinating birds and insects into our school grounds.

To do this, classes buddied up and began by viewing a powerpoint on many of the different bee species local to our area.  This was really interesting, and students learnt pretty quickly that not all bees live in hives or large communities like the European honeybee is known too.  Once we had the student’s interest, we moved to the gardens where we worked together to weed, turn the soil, plant lots of bright, colourful flowers and finally water them.  For many students this was their first hands-on experience working in a garden and they loved it!

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We then returned to the classroom where we watched a video about building bee hotels and how doing this, as well as our work in the garden was the best way to encourage pollinators.  Students then built their own bee hotels; hollowing out bamboo sticks, building walls so that they were nice and snug and decorating tins.

These bee hotels are now going to go into the gardens that we have re-planted!

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Finally, as students were finishing their lesson we viewed several images of what supermarkets would look like with and without pollinators.  This was a great way to finish the lesson and helped to give a purpose to what we had done together and why it was important.

Amanda Krieg-Owens
Renmark Primary School

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