Grayling 4

Good morning everybody! I hope that you’ve all had a restful weekend and that you enjoyed our Celebration Assembly on Friday. This week we are going to think about Health and Wellbeing and the effect that nature has on our lives. I’m hoping that we will all become ‘Transformers’ through growing and gardening.

Your grown-ups have an email to help with the assembly and in this week’s notes I’ve included a clip for them that some of us watched together in school, linked with The Eden Project and the work of Sir Tim Smit. You may want to watch this together as a reminder.

Those of you who met Sir Tim when he came to visit will remember his advice to you about dreaming big and how if we all join together we can transform places through hope and nature. So that is exactly what we are going to do this week!

I would like you to think about a space in your home, or your garden if you have one, that you would like to transform over the coming weeks by planting some seeds or caring for plants. Some of you may already have seeds and spaces that you have started to transform, but don’t worry if you haven’t as we can help and I have let your grown-ups know what we can do.

I would like you to take a ‘before’ snapshot of the space (this can be a photograph or a drawing) and we’ll then look at this again in a few weeks’ time once things start to grow. If Sir Tim had done this at the beginning of his project this would have been his ‘before’ and ‘after’ …

As most of you are now able to stay home and stay safe, I thought it would also be good this week to take a little virtual trip over the Atlantic to New York City to see another beautiful transformation project. The High Line is a public park built on a historic railway line which runs above the streets of Manhattan. It was saved from demolition by neighborhood residents and opened in 2009 as a beautiful public space where visitors can enjoy nature, art, and design.

The High Line is supported by a team of dedicated volunteers. There’s a lovely clip below showing one of these volunteers, Gammy Miller, in action. I wonder if you can find any links between interdependence and wellbeing and what Gammy is doing within her community?

So your mission this week, should you choose to accept it, is to start your own natural ‘transformation’ through growing and gardening. Your starting point may look like this …

… and if you ‘dream big’, who knows what your ‘after’ will look like!

Lots of you have already been telling me about the changes in nature that you can see all around you and I would love to see your pictures and drawings of the natural things that are making us all say ‘wow!’ at the moment too, now that we genuinely have time to ‘stand and stare’.

I can’t wait to hear from you (your grown-up will help you to share pictures, drawings and ‘wow’ moments with me). I will reply to any messages that come in and I will share all the highlights in our celebration on Friday.

Stay sheltered, safe, healthy and happy Team Damers. School is very empty without you.

Mrs Smith ☺️