newsletter issue 10 summer 2008

Tree Buddies

Hillingdon Community Trust approved a grant of £4,500 in October 2007 to Green Corridor for its Tree Buddies project.

The Tree Buddies Project is aimed at Year 7 pupils, the first year of secondary school, and has two core objectives; to help children from immigrant families recently arrived in the UK to integrate into their schools and communities; and secondly to raise environmental awareness. The young people are paired up as ‘Buddies’ in their classes to begin learning about their local environment, and specifically trees. One of the first tasks for the pupils saw them participating in an art workshop, where they produced larger than life models of butterflies. The workshops took place either at their school, or at the Chiswick House Learning Centre and used willow tree branches and paper. In a second workshop, the pupils used drama and actions, instead of speech, to enable them to act out and describe a tree’s life cycle.

To build on the lessons learnt in class, the young people then spent a day at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in West London, where they learnt about the different habitats that plants and trees live in around the world, such as desert, rain forest, tropical and temperate climate. In preparation for this outdoor activity, the pupils were asked to find a picture on the Internet of a tree or plant from their home country, or do some research into a tree that they found interesting and bring the information with them on the trip.

The workshops give the children the opportunity to learn “off-site” in an outside environment, this outdoor engagement has clearly been very beneficial in expanding the creativity and learning of all those taking part.

The comments from the children and school teachers from Rosedale College and Harlington Community School show how well received the project has been:

"I learnt a lot about trees
I learnt how to listen and work in a group
I learnt what happens to trees when you don’t look after them
I learnt how to act in front of people in a group
I likes being a tree because it helped us understand how bad it is to chop a tree down
I learnt that you needed to work as a team
I learnt that when you cooperate it makes a good team
I learnt to work with people I don’t normally socialise with more"