Thakeham Celebrates 1 Year of Eddie and Ellie’s workshop

Celebrating 1 Year of Eddie and Ellie’s Workshop

Today we reach 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’s home and go on an environmental adventures.

From the success of the Eddie and Ellie book we launched a school programme on Eddie and Ellie 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 the favourite workshops so far?

Reading workshops 

“Set up well to engage and interest readers in wildlife and 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 whilst 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’s visits are 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 Ellies special ‘wildlife handbook’. This detailed all types of British wildlife from slowworms, rabbits and of course our favourite – the hedgehog!

After an action-packed day, the students returned to the classroom where they put together story boards detailing how they would adapt the book if it was a movie. As expected, the students got very creative and were very proud to show us there masterpieces afterwards.

It all combines to bring an understanding of sustainability to life and inspire future generations.

Eddie & Ellie Continued..

The purpose of these workshops is to combine and understanding of sustainability to life and inspire future generations in taking more care of the world around them. Giving pupils and teachers an insight into the natural environment, our bio-diversity activities paired with an exciting day out to a Thakeham’s developments.

Eddie and Ellie will be out and about to more and more schools over the coming years…