The Family Learning Festival is an annual awareness campaign in October that encourages families to learn together in informal settings. This year Surrey Lifelong Learning Partnership worked with numerous partners to put on many fun events for families across the county.
Families explore Garden Design
Loseley Fields Children’s Centre in Binscombe hosted an exciting and fun-packed Saturday which attracted thirty families. The Children’s Centre has already started its own Community Garden and The Northbourne Action Group (a local resident’s group) are working on an allotment area that will ‘go into production’ in 2010. Both felt this event would be an opportunity to get the community to help with planning what should be grown next Spring, but also encourage more people to get involved.
Broadwater Secondary School provided ICT expertise that allowed people to suggest designs and have since started weekly Garden Design sessions on the computer. It was important that there were also things that encouraged families to enjoy their own gardens; each family made a fat ball to hang to attract birds.
Secretts Garden Centre and Sainsburys kindly provided items that could be used for each child to create their own tray garden, and for each family to pot plant bulbs to take home. Other activities included ‘Seed Heads’, or for the uninitiated - stockings filled with sawdust and grass seeds, made to look like potato heads that have a face drawn on that sprout green hair!
Surrey Wildlife Trust worked with the children to make wooden necklaces from branches and beads, so by the end of the day about forty children were sporting a new and unique design in jewellery. The day was a wonderful success, and further adult classes are planned in gardening and horticulture to enable the community to get the best from their green spaces.
Other partners included Godalming Confederation of Schools, Surrey County Council Family Learning and Surestart.
