The REEP Garden Awards offer opportunities for work across many areas of the curriculum, both when planning your garden entry and in future years when the plan is turned into a reality.
All areas of the curriculum, from Mathematics to History; Geography to English, will be touched on in working with your garden plan. Emphases will vary, but it is a useful exercise to make a checklist of the subjects you can cover through this project, using the headings below as a starter. The key areas of the curriculum which will feature most strongly are:
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Religious ideas are central to the REEP Garden Awards. Although statutory requirements vary from local authority to local authority, it should be noted that each of the four virtual gardens featured as a resource on this site has a specific focus on one of the world religions:
The garden as a place of pleasure - Islam
The quiet garden - Buddhism
The working garden - Christianity
The wild garden - Judaism
For more detailed information, see the notes in the gardens themselves.
ICT
Information and Communication Technology is central to the process of designing and presenting a garden for the REEP Garden Awards. All areas of the curriculum can play a prominent role in designing your entry:
Finding things out
Developing ideas and making things happen
Exchanging and sharing information
Reviewing and modifying work
Breadth of study
ART AND DESIGN
Designing a garden inevitably involves many of the skills at the heart of the Art and Design curriculum. Features within the garden can be considered as discreet design projects, but the design of the garden as a whole covers several curriculum areas - even if many of the materials which provide its texture are living things!
The Garden Awards offer opportunities for work within all the areas of the Art and Design curriculum at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3:
Exploring and developing ideas
Investigating and making art, craft and design
Evaluating and developing work
Knowledge and understanding
Breadth of study
MUSIC
The Awards offer opportunities for composition at all key stages.
SCIENCE
The Awards are most relevant to teaching the Life Processes and Living Things section at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3: - Key Stage 1
- Life processes
- Green plants
- Variation and classification
- Living things in their environment
- Key Stage 2
- Growth and Nutrition
- Reproduction
- Variation and classification
- Living things in their environment
- Adaptation
- Feeding relationships
- Micro-organism
- Key Stage 3
- Nutrition and growth of green plants
- Respiration
- Variation
- Classification
- Inheritance
- Living things and their environment
- Adaptation and competition
- Feeding relationships
The completed garden can; of course, continue to be used to teach these areas of the curriculum as well as; for example, investigative skills and collecting, evaluating and presenting evidence.
CITIZENSHIP
Although curriculum guidelines only cover Key Stages 3 and 4, the following areas are important for work on the REEP Awards, especially in the context of working in collaboration with the local community:
Developing skills of enquiry and communication.
Developing skills of participation and responsible action.
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Practical
tips on garden design... |
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Relevance
to RE, Music, Art, Citizenship and ICT... |
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What
to do and when... |
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