At Limekilns, we aim to develop and enhance our learning by working with partners.
We aim to keep you updated here on our community partner links:
April 2024
Limekilns community garden Dunfermline Press
December 2023
Our school has just achieved our Level 4 Royal Horticultural Gardening Award!
To achieve Level 4, we demonstrated:
- How our garden supports wildlife
- How we use gardening to support our curriculum
- How we share our plants or seeds with others
November 2023
To mark Remembrance Day all our children painted poppy rocks to be placed in our Community garden. Our Primary 7s represented our school by attending the service at Limekilns Church and placed a wreath at our local War Memorial.
October 2023
We have had a busy month in our Community Garden. Every class has been enjoying opportunities to sample their produce and take items home to share.
Our upper school classes have been involved in a new project called Soil to Slice; A programme that encourages communities throughout Scotland to get involved in growing, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking with more nutritious grains in their local area. We have planted wheat grain in our raised beds and are excited for the next step of this process next year.
Our classes all enjoyed a Halloween themed event in our Community Garden led by the CLP Nature Conservation Group. They designed masks, looked for hidden ghosts, counted pumpkins and took part in many other activities.
September 2023
Please have a look at our Community Garden journey by accessing our SWAY below…
August 2023
Over the summer holidays our garden has bloomed! Our class sunflowers are HUGE and our raised beds are full of flowers and pumpkins. During the summer, members of our local community enjoyed the carrots that were grown over spring. Our classes are now planning their mini garden project for the next few weeks.
We achieved our Level 3 RSHP award!
Our school and nursery took part in the Limekilns Garden Competition to create a range of artwork and poetry on a garden theme.
June 2023
We have loved spending this last month of the school year in our Community Garden. All of our pupils have experienced a wide range of learning opportunities and our garden is now full of all sorts of flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruit trees.
Each class cut their ‘Limekilns Lettuce’ and made up bags which we sold to parents in our playground at the end of the school day as a mini enterprise project. We also dug up our potatoes to enjoy at home.
We are looking forward to the new term after the summer holidays where we will be using our garden as a context for learning.
May 2023
Our Community Garden journey featured in our local newspaper, the Dunfermline Press, this month! A great opportunity to let others in our area know what we have been doing…
- Curriculum delivery
- Learning for sustainability
- Intergenerational learning
- Community partnerships
- Leadership skills
Our classes have visited our garden to plant wildflowers to create a haven for wildlife, have planted runner beans and have been learning outdoors through investigating plants and insects.
April 2023
Our Limekilns Primary School Community Garden OFFICIAL LAUNCH!
Friday 21st April, the official LAUNCH of our School and Community Garden!
Today, all of our pupils, staff and the many parents and community members who have supported our journey all gathered together for our official opening. The sun was shining and we were able to cut the ribbon in front of everyone who helped to make this garden possible.
We returned from our school Easter holidays to find that many of our seeds have started to grow!! We are now looking after our raised beds with regular watering.
This week every class in our school went over to our garden to plant their own sunflower to take home to look after. This term we will track their progress and see which sunflower grows the tallest!
We also weeded our garden, checked for litter and gathered materials for art.
March 2023
Monday 27th March…our first 2 classes headed over to our garden for their first hands on session!
There was great excitement from everyone as they had the opportunity to sit in our outdoor classroom, plant lettuce, carrots and potatoes and investigate our new outdoor area. We were lucky to be supported from kind volunteers from our local community who came along to help and share their ideas and words of wisdom!
Over the rest of the week, all our classes including our nursery enjoyed their first gardening session! Our raised beds are now full of seeds for us to take care of and watch grow.
What an amazing community! On the 25th March, so many volunteers turned up to help us in the Limekilns School Community Garden. We achieved so much!
Our volunteers helped to move topsoil and compost into our herb planters/flower beds, dug up ground to lay turf between our raised beds, planted some fruit trees and a variety of other plants and generally prepared our garden for its first use.
We are really excited to start planting this week! Next term we are looking forward to lots more opportunities and learning in our exciting new outdoor space!
Our school garden is now almost ready to begin using. Our leadership team came up with names for our raised beds. They choose the theme of trees then worked in height order to decide on the names. These are now attached to each bed on slates.
We are really excited to start planting next week. We have created a weekly timetable for each class to work in our outdoor classroom and garden with members of our local community to begin planting carrots, potatoes and other vegetables.
We have started working towards the Royal Horticultural Society‘s school gardening award scheme.
This five-level rewards scheme provides achievable goals which will help to turn your garden into a valuable learning resource.
We have just achieved LEVEL 1!
This level was linked to planning our gardening project and identifying the benefits to our school.
To achieve this level, we needed to demonstrate;
- We understand the benefits of gardening with children and young people
- A person has been chosen to lead the gardening project/activity
- An area has been identified for a gardening project/activity
- We have planned the area and are looking at resources we might need
- We understand hazards in the garden
February 2023
Over the past month, our school/community garden has progressed further thanks to the help and support of our parents, volunteers and community partners.
On the 4th February, many more volunteers came along again to help us continue to prepare the ground and finish the building of our raised beds. Through grant funding, we were able to buy the compost needed to fill our beds and this was delivered and distributed. We now have a bed for each class in our school and nursery, including an additional slanted bed for wheelchair access.
We have created a potting area for planting that will shortly have tables of different heights and have moveable herb planters and smaller beds for our pupils to plant sunflowers at the entrance to our garden. We are now awaiting a delivery of tree stumps for our outdoor classroom area. Very soon, with the support of local volunteers, we will be able to start planting!
Our Garden Pupil Leadership team organised a whole school competition to design a logo for our garden. We were inundated with entries and the standard was very high! This made it tricky for our team to judge but after a lot of consideration and discussion, they unanimously decided on our winner.
A huge well done to Evie from Primary 6. Her logo will be sent away to be used on our community garden sign.
Wildlife on the Firth of Forth
Our school is part of a community event all about Wildlife on the Firth of Forth, which takes place on Saturday 25th February in Limekilns Church Hall between 10:00am-5:00pm. We have taken the opportunity to become involved in order to raise awareness of the wildlife on the doorstep of local communities in our area.
As a school, we have been part of a community-led vision to restore seagrass habitats in the Firth of Forth. Alongside this, a £2.4 million project is currently running to improve our local marine ecosystems and help to tackle climate change. We have been asked to create a portable sculpture based on a fish that lives nearby us here in Limekilns. This artwork will be displayed at the ‘Wildlife of the Forth’ photography exhibition and may be taken to other events around the country including to Parliament to raise awareness of the importance of seagrass.
This is a very exciting opportunity for us!
January 2023
Over the past month, our Community Garden Leadership team have been busy working with adults from our local community and the CLP Nature group to finalise our plans for our garden. Our biggest task was to discuss and choose the appropriate materials to make our raised beds. This involved analysing information about different materials to ensure we were making a sustainable and environmentally friendly decision.
We were also able to spend the funding we received from the Scottish Government as part of the ‘Food for Thought’ campaign and now have a wide range of gardening and cooking resources that we will be able to use over the coming months and years.
The Rural Skills Training team came along for 2 days this month to clear and prepare the site for us. They cut back the whole area with trimmers and cutters, dug out perennial weed roots and removed barbed wire. This was a huge help in enabling us to move forward with our project.
On the 21st January we had support from over 20 volunteers, parents, children and members of the community, who came along to help us prepare the ground and begin building our raised beds. Amazingly, in one day we were able to construct 4 beds, a huge achievement! A massive thank you to everyone who came along and to the Bruce who very kindly supplied the workers with lunch and drinks!
December 2022
Our hugely successful school Christmas Fair raised £1500!
Many local businesses came along to sell their crafts and children, families and members of our community enjoyed some entertainment while visiting our Christmas café and browsing our stalls. Santa made an appearance and our Primary 7’s helped our Parent Council to ensure everything ran smoothly.
November 2022
Our Primary 6/7 class visited the Lime Centre in Charlestown where they spent the day learning all about our local area. They learned about the history of buildings in Fife, developed an awareness of the materials used and the building boom at the end of the 19th century.
Charlestown was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution as a planned village here in 1754! The whole community was based around the workplace and was developed to exploit the large deposits of limestone and coal. Our pupils had the opportunity to learn all about the lime cycle, how the limestone was excavated and how it was shipped worldwide! They had hands on experience of mixing, preparing and using lime mortar and working with plaster of Paris.
A fantastic trip where they learned so much about the community we live in.
Our Leadership team spent some time this month evaluating the pros and cons of different materials that might be used for the raised beds in our community garden. They used a traffic light system to look at which options were best based on costing, sustainability, aesthetics and where the materials could be sourced from. They had many interesting points to add to the meeting and helped to make all the final decisions.
Watch this space for updates on the next stage of our garden 🙂
October 2022
Our Community Garden Leadership team met with the CLP group this month to discuss further plans for our garden. Our team had gathered information from pupils in school about what they’d like to see in our garden and were able to feed this information back to the committee.
This meeting also involved a lot of discussion around the materials needed for pathways and raised beds and what costings would be involved. Our team are planning to meet after the school holidays to look at each option and make some important decisions, taking into account availability, cost, sustainability and aesthetics. They are also very excited at being involved in helping to finalise the designs for the garden.
September 2022
Our Community Garden leadership team, made up of 9 pupils from across primaries 3-7, have started working with the Limekilns, Charlestown and Pattiesmuir Nature Conservation Group. This joint project is to establish a community garden, wildlife pond and a poly tunnel to enrich our curriculum and encourage our pupils to play an active role in the growing and harvesting of food, as well as opportunities for noticing and enjoying wildlife.
They have made an excellent start in helping to organise this exciting project.
- They met with the Conservation Group to discuss their ideas and look at plans designed by our local landscape architect.
- They shared their thoughts on what might be included and grown in our community garden.
- They travelled to Crombie community garden to see a similar project in action and meet with the organisers to ask some very important questions about sustainability and funding.
- They had the opportunity to take part in some hands on experience, digging up and tasting locally grown vegetables.
Primary 1 went for a learning walk in the village to make links with businesses in our local community. They stopped at The Bruce, Sundial and Coorie to ask for some menus for their role play cafe in class. These were gratefully received and helped to enhance literacy within the classroom.
