Family Saturdays through the Autumn

We have had to be incredibly flexible this year in our Family Saturday programme and luckily we have still been able to go ahead each weekend. This season, we have been joined by our Community Chef, Giorgia and our Community Outreach Gardener, Sharin. It’s amazing to realise that we are now a completely outdoor programme! With a fire for company we cooked pizza on the fire, made hot chocolate and have had a wealth of creative projects this Summer and Autumn. These have been the highlights:

Bringing the hoarding to life

As the heat of summer started to decline we took a look at the seeds in the garden; with all their strange shapes and ingenious ways of dispersing their seeds, there were many curious and exciting shapes to discover.

Calendula seeds are reminiscent of a prehistoric or Jurassic fossil, poppies have an iconic umbrella whilst the artichoke heads have a glorious display of fluffy hair with seeds hiding at the bottom. During our Family Saturdays we explored these shapes using magnifying glasses, drawing bigger versions of them. The next stage was to translate these images into stencils, some small and detailed and some large. We practised, refined and eventually came up with a whole collection of stencils ready to paint on the hoarding.

What you see on the hoarding is completely the children and their families' creations - the garden provided the inspiration and everything else is their doing! What a joy to see the process from inspiration to creation. We are nearly finished with a few more stencils to go up in the new year as well as their clay creations (seed heads pressed into clay), which have been fired and made into a mosaic by Simeon and Mark from the CSM MAKE space at the Story Garden. It’s been wonderful to see the project from the start to near completion and it’s lovely to see all this artwork framing the entrance to the garden.

Loose Parts Play

We’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with CSM Architecture student, James and what an adventure Loose Parts Play has been! This is a play practice using loose materials for children and families to explore and build together, which is framed around the benefit of risk. We built balancing walkways, dens, waterways and discovered hidden monsters in the garden. We used maps, drawings and clay to follow the story around the garden. There has been a wealth of adventurous little ones balancing on walkways made by older children who have had to think carefully about whether their building is safe, and have learnt new skills of observation and balance…. If I place this plank here and step on this end what will happen to the other end?

Loose Parts Play is a great opportunity for children to try something new, test out their design and building skills. It’s wildly creative and has kept many children’s attention for the whole 1.5hours!

Thanks to everyone who joins us on Saturday rain or shine, we’re all used to being outdoors now and wearing a few pairs of socks!!

---

Notes from the Garden