On Friday 1st April, Year visited the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Edgbaston as part of their Science studies about plants.
When we arrived we toured the amazing glasshouses and explored the huge variety of plants from the Tropical, Sub-tropical, Mediterranean and Arid climates. It was amazing to see so many plants and to discover how so many are used to help make many of the medicines, food, drink and household items we use on a daily basis. As part of our ‘treasure hunt’ we even found carnivorous plants that suck up insects that land inside them and cacti that were about three times taller than us!
After a quick break we were outside to explore the gardens as we went orienteering across the grounds, stamping our orienteering cards at the special posts we identified from our maps.
To round off the day we had a super session in the classroom, where we explored the life cycle of the flowering plant and even created our own ‘human plants’ to represent the different parts of the flower and their role in pollination. Dolly made a fantastic bee, flying around the room, collecting the pollen (sticky ping pong balls), which then were transferred to the other flowers.