Corstorphine Primary school is buzzing

Towards the end of 2018, I received an enquiry from Corstorphine Primary school which included a lovely hand written letter from one of the pupils. In it, the pupil described how she had come across the Edinburgh Living Landscape page, while researching about bees. She had signed the pollinator pledge and had told her friends in her class about it. The letter and email finished off by asking if we would be able to come and talk to their school all about Edinburgh Living Landscape, the pollinator pledge, and pollinators. Well, after such a lovely request, how could we say no?

We practised our new talk a few times with our colleagues, but we were still a bit nervous going into the first session – what if the kids didn’t like the activities? What if no one wanted to join in? Well, we needn’t have feared, because right from the start it was clear these children were ready to help us make Edinburgh green! After singing a lovely welcoming song to warm everyone up, the teachers introduced us to the children, and we started the session.

The talk has sections of information, interspersed with interactive quizzes, actions, and games. We find out what pollination is and who the pollinators are; we discover a world with no bees and what that would mean; we see through the eyes of a bee as we explore bee vision; learn how bees make honey and just how many of them it takes to make it; find out what other garden wildlife benefits from bee friendly gardening; and finally explore some steps we can all take to help our pollinators.

To round the talk off, we played the “Green the Grey” video. The children responded brilliantly to this short cartoon, which perfectly captures the aims of the project, in an easily understood and entertaining form. There were chuckles when the glasses landed on the crow and the old man, impressed gasps when Prince’s Street turned green, and a few quiet exclamations of “yeah!” when the music played and Edinburgh castle appeared.

We asked the kids at the end if they were going to get Edinburgh buzzing – if the volume of their answer is anything to go by, I would say they most definitely are.