The whole school travelled to Logan Gardens today for a ‘Lost Word’ experience. Kate, our ranger from the Royal Botanical Society of Edinburgh, used poetry for an exploration of our local natural environment; looking at biodiversity in a different way.
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’ or underused word in nature – 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 poetry and art describing nature using figurative language. The pupils were then set the challenge of using their senses to discover the nature around them, creating a word bank to share with the whole 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 the session and we were very lucky to have missed both the preceding hail storm and the following downpour.
#Successful Learners
