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Celebrating one year of Eddie and Ellie workshops
Celebrating 1 Year of Eddie and Ellie’s Workshop
Today, we reached a milestone. Our Eddie and Ellie workshops are one year old – Happy Birthday!
A programme of fun and education based around our Eddie and Ellie storybook characters, two young explorers who move to their new Thakeham home and go on environmental adventures.
With the success of the Eddie and Ellie book, we launched a school programme based on Eddie and Ellie’s educational activities. These proved to be a big hit with Key Stage 2 students and teachers alike. A programme born out of our passion to share knowledge of nature and ecology with the future generation in a fun yet informative way.
Following the success of Eddie and Ellie’s Wild Adventures book, we decided the next step was to introduce an array of workshops and activities to keep students engaged in the most exciting ways.
What better way to celebrate our first year than to look back at some of our favourite workshops so far?
Reading workshops
“Set up well to engage and interest readers in wildlife, it has good detail and touches of humour… well done.”
Peter Campbell, Associate Adviser, WSCC
What better way to kick off the programme than by incorporating Eddie and Ellie’s Wildlife Adventures into a group reading workshop. Both teacher and kids follow the story of Eddie and Ellie’s adventure, resulting in a classroom full of laughter while everyone gets to enjoy an insight into ecology and biodiversity.
Water Cycle Workshop:
From reading to something a little more hands-on! We wanted an activity that is fun and informative to share our passion for sustainability and to participate in a variety of fun and educational activities.
Year 3 students had a blast getting creative with their water cycle and recycling posters and even got out of the classroom to get involved in seed planting, rain gauge making, and even constructing their first bee hotel!
Site visit and wildlife workshop
Letting schools that are close to our site visits participate is an important aspect of the programme. Key Stage 2 students kitted out in hard hats and high vis ahead of their site visit earlier this year.
Once on site, students were given a tour of the development and given Eddie and Ellie’s special ‘wildlife handbook’. This detailed all types of British wildlife, from slowworms to rabbits and, of course, our favourite, the hedgehog!
After an action-packed day, the students returned to the classroom, where they put together storyboards detailing how they would adapt the book if it were a movie. As expected, the students got very creative and were very proud to show us their masterpieces afterwards.
Eddie & Ellie Continued..
The purpose of these workshops is to bring an understanding of sustainability to life and inspire future generations to take more care of the world around them. Giving pupils and teachers an insight into the natural environment, our bio-diversity activities are paired with an exciting day out to Thakeham’s developments.
Eddie and Ellie will be out and about at more and more schools over the coming years.
