Creative Partnerships – Coming alive

Coming Alive at Kate?s Hill Community Primary School in Dudley, West Midlands is an exciting Creative Partnerships Black Country project in which Year 2 children (aged 6 years) are creating a garden area for the whole school to enjoy. They are growing vegetables for the school kitchen, which links into the school healthy eating agenda. Coming Alive also links to geography, science and literacy. Pupils work alongside staff to prepare the ground and propagate seeds in a greenhouse ready for planting. They also ran their own plant sale at the school fête in the summer term.

Alongside this business focus of the project, the children have worked with a creative professional to develop every aspect of the outside area. Artist Hannah Dyer has helped them create nine circular murals which are sited on brick exterior walls in the garden area. After a visit to Sudeley Castle to look at knot gardens and formal planting, every child produced a ceramic plaque based on drawings they made at Sudeley and these were placed alongside the murals in the garden. The children are also making bio-degradable benches and bird and bat boxes to encourage wildlife into the new garden.

The school won first prize in the Dudley Junior Pride Competition, which was open to primary schools interested in improving their local environment. Judges were impressed by the way a ?wasted space at the back of the school had been transformed into an oasis of colour and vitality?. They were particularly pleased with the standard of artwork on the walls and the fact that it was a sustainable project and had changed the way children thought about the science curriculum.