Day 7 school #10: Dumpton School

Pretty shadow patterns on my
morning ride up the Castleman
Trailway

For the second time this week I was on the Castleman Trailway. Now familiar with the route, I sped through the trees from Hamworthy up to Wimborne (in 35 minutes! Woohoo!) and then on to Dumpton School, in its idyllic rural setting. What a place to receive your education!


Environmental awareness weaves it's way into life at Dumpton in many ways, thanks to the enthusiasm of the staff team led by the enigmatic Mr Browning.




First there's the everyday jobs. The 'Paper Police', for example, are a self-organised group of pupils who collect paper from all the offices and classrooms every week for recycling. Then there a number of ways the curriculum and extra-curricular work support children's learning about the environment. Here are just a few of them....

Growing success  

An allotment plot with it's scarecrow

A whole range of extra-curricular activities support children to learn in and about the natural environment. The school's allotment is a thing of glory. Established by Mr Browning, the idea that children can opt to spend their lunchtimes in the allotment if they want to.
School staff supervise the allotments but don't organise specific activities - the children just get on with it and are encouraged to experiment on their own plots. Which plants grow better? What's the optimal amount of watering? How might they improve the yield of their crops? What will keep the pests away?
So besides playing and relaxing, the children are also (unwittingly) doing some independent learning, and occasionally get some vegetables to eat.
Children from Year 3 upwards are allowed to take on an allotment. Before that, in Pre Prep, the children learn about what plants need to survive, so the allotment is an opportunity for them to put their knowledge into practice.




The Fiver Challenge plant stall, looking blooming lovely.
 Can you spot Reg?

Pupils' horticultural skills were put to use this summer in another extra curricular activity, the Fiver Challenge. In this activity, pupils were given £5 and challenged to create a micro-business that generated profit. The gang of entrepreneurial pupils at Dumpton decided to invest their money in seeds and seedlings, which they planted or brought on until they were ready to sell.

When I arrived, some of the industrious pupils were setting up their stall ready to sell to parents. They explained their choice of plants (everybody loves a geranium!) and how many they thought they would sell. Deborah Meaden would have been hugely impressed!

A green curriculum

Across the school, teachers make imaginative connections with environmental topics through their curriculum learning, and often make use of the amazing outdoor spaces in the school to help them.
Year 3 showed me their potato project. Each pair of children was given 3 potatoes to plant in a tyre planter. They had to nurture the plants, and at the end of the summer term they got to dig up their potato crop.
The activity was loaded with Maths, including

• counting the number of potatoes at the end of the season
• weighing the potatoes
• working out averages - what's the average weight of a potato? What's the average number of new potatoes grown from each seed potato?

What a simple but richly interesting way of using the outdoor resource to aid learning.


🥔 🥔 🥔 🥔 🥔 🥔







Children's plastic pledges - click for a bigger image

Pledging on plastics


Here's another fab example of curriculum work by Dumpton pupils on an environmental theme. Another school to be inspired by the news about plastic in the oceans, the children produced this fantastic display featuring facts about single-use plastics and wrote their own pledges to reduce their use.


The teachers got involved as well, making their own waste-reduction commitments, including a pledge to stop laminating! Well done teachers!

Teachers' plastic pledge - click
for a bigger image

Lastly....plastic work goes experimental! The children had heard about biodegradable plastics and were considering switching to biodegradable plastic cups in school. But how do you dispose of a biodegradable cup? It can't go in with plastic recycling, and in landfill

it'll just release a load of methane (greenhouse gas). How long does it take a biodegradable cup to break down, and could they be composted at school, the children wondered?

Reg at the biodegradable plastic test site.

Here's their experiment to find out! Underneath this matting, the children have buried a selection of 'compostable' and regular, non-biodegradable plastic containers. They plan to check back regularly to see which containers have rotted down and which are still there.
We loved this thoughtful and experimental approach!


Mrs Cox also explained how she was making every effort to introduce pupils and parents to a lower plastic lifestyle - for example giving away bamboo toothbrushes and reusable food containers as prizes for school activities. She's right - we all have to start with small changes, and I was totally inspired by the efforts being made throughout the school.


Keep up the excellent work, Dumpton!