The whole school travelled to Logan Gardens today for a ‘Lost Word’ experience. After enjoying a yummy picnic lunch in the gardens, the children joined Kate, our ranger from the Royal Botanical Society of Edinburgh, who used poetry as exploration of our local natural environment and biodiversity in different ways.
The focus was on the book, The Lost Words, which is a collaborative project between writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris. The Lost Words celebrates the relationship between language and the living world, and of nature’s power to spark the imagination. Robert Macfarlane has created a series of spell-poems – one for each lost word – while Jackie Morris, inspired by her lifelong passion for Britain’s landscapes and wildlife, has painted watercolours and used gold leaf to take the viewer on a visual journey of nature. Every school in Scotland will receive a copy of this book as a result of a Crowd Funding project.
The children went for a poetry walk around the garden where Kate shared examples of work describing nature using figurative language. They were then set the challenge of using their senses to discover the nature around them, creating a word bank to share with the group of what they found. The boys and girls also created natural sculpture artwork using foraged materials to represent their particular plant of study.
Everyone enjoyed a lovely afternoon in the sunshine!
