Page 4 - Abberley Adventures - April 2022

ABBERLEY ADVENTURES
4
Outdoor Education
Orienteering, rope ladders, den building and wild cooking have all featured this term. The culmination was a 2-course tasting menu of flatbreads and guacamole plus campfire roasted pears with honey and mascarpone. Willow has been harvested ready for weaving and the plantation extended.
More than anything, this term has been about tree planting!
Consignments from The Woodland Trust as part of the Queen’s Green Canopy initiative started arriving half-way through February and we have been planting during Outdoor Ed. sessions and on Saturday mornings. There are 140 saplings around the school garden to make a wild-harvest-hedge comprising hazel, blackthorn, crab apple, elder and dog rose. The dormice will feast on hazel nuts, sloes for chaffinches and the yellowhammer and dogrose nectar for insects. The children also built a fence to protect this area from the ponies.
Another 250 trees have been planted by children in a field close to The Inkpot – oak, wild cherry, willow, silver birch, rowan and hawthorn. A couple of more established cherry trees have also arrived as part of the Sakura project (marking 150 years of friendship between the UK and Japan). We are going to call this area the Jubilee Wood. The children have taken their planting responsibilities seriously and given the delicate saplings a good start. We will revisit the plantations every now and then for continued nurturing. Be it habit, nectar, food, shelter, carbon or den building materials, the potential of this project has really captured the imaginations of all involved.
Lots more bushcraft, shelter building and fire making is planned for next term and children in Years 6, 7 and 8 are gearing-up for exciting residential trips to The Great Escape in Shropshire this June. If you haven’t seen it already and would like to know more about what is in store for these lucky children, then please see the promotional video by clicking here.
Our Year 8 children will, of course be doing a wide range of exciting outdoor challenges after their exams. The highlights will, we suspect, be a trek through the Welsh mountains with nights spent under canvass followed by a kayak trip down the River Wye and then the traditional week away in Cornwall where surfing will be one of the main activities.
Art
The Art Department has been as busy as ever. It was so lovely to attend the annual Malvern St James Junior Schools’ Art Exhibition on March 5th. This event has always been a high-point in the Art department calendar as it gives so many Abberley Hall pupils the opportunity to show off what they have created during the Autumn Term. This year their hard work paid off with several pupils receiving awards and enjoying a morning viewing the exhibition with family and friends:
» Minnie Rudge – Highly Commended in Year 3
» Aurora Atkinson – Taylor – Winner in Year 4
» Pippa Brocklehurst – Highly Commended in Year 5
» Olivia Hickton – Highly Commended in Year 7
» Louis Burt – Highly Commended in Year 8
» Olivia Evington – Winner in Year 8
We also had several entries in Year 7 for the Shrewsbury Prep School Art Competition. Eliyah Arif and Olivia Hickton were selected as finalists and attended workshops and a prize giving ceremony at Shrewsbury School where Olivia was awarded runner-up in her category with her fabulous stop-motion animation on the theme Past, Present and Future.