The Great Explorers hopped onto the Ghyll Royd minibus and took a trip to the Stephen Smith’s Garden Centre this week.
The trip was part of the ‘Understanding the World’ section of the Early Years Curriculum, learning about how things grow.
We first looked at the different seeds you could buy. There were rows and rows of plants, flowers, herbs and foods to buy in their seed packets.
Then we had to look for pots to plant our seeds in. We chose pots that were big enough to allow the plants to grow in a good space, rather than being all cramped up together and unable to grow properly.
Then we headed to the busy café where people were eating their breakfasts and drinking juice and tea. We sat down and the nice man at the till gave us all a goody bag with a biscuit, a drink and some colouring pencils to draw with.
They gave us sheets of paper with different writing, drawing and colouring exercises to do. We practiced our letter formation using a dot-to-dot method of writing out the hidden word.
After our snack we headed outside and looked at the different animal statues. There were foxes, ducks, and pigs!
Back in the playground, Miss Coulton and Mrs Johnson showed us how to plant the seeds. In groups we all gathered round our pots to fill with compost and scatter the seeds.
We had a mixture of seeds including poppy, poached egg plants (yellow with white petals), rosemary, chive and rocket!
We also bought some sweet peas but we will plant these on another day as they need to grow against a wall.
Once we had scattered the seeds, we had to think about what would help the seeds grow. We worked together and thought really hard, and decided that water and sunlight would be the best things to make our seeds grow, so we went over to the hosepipe and filled our watering cans.
The pots are now sat in the playground waiting for the sunlight, and we will water them daily to make sure they continue to grow.
We can’t wait to watch the plants grow.
