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Steyning Community Orchard - Getting the Kids on Board!

Dark grey clouds sat along the rim of the Downs and a keen wind swept from the west across the top of the Memorial Playing Field and through the community orchard where we were struggling to put up a gazebo for shelter. This was early May and the vision had been a warm evening with the playing field bathed in the soft light of the setting sun as we welcomed our first group of children to an orchard session designed just for them. That was the vision. The reality was that, at lunch time, we had come close to cancelling the evening because of the forecast. But here we were, undeterred, ready for anything.

Steyning Community Orchard is there for everyone to enjoy, whatever their age. Volunteers have worked hard to restore the orchard, people have donated trees and events like ‘Apple Day’ have attracted families, but this year we want to go further and, for the first time, have deliberately reached out to the youngest members of our community.
 
Getting children involved is not always easy so to ‘get the kids on board’ we offered local schools, playgroups, and youth groups the opportunity to join us for an ‘orchard session’ of games and activities which would introduce them to the Memorial Field Orchard; its history, how and why it has been restored, and its importance for people and wildlife, whilst instilling the idea that it belongs to them as much as anyone else; that children can visit the orchard, play around in it, picnic in it, watch it grow and pick the produce.

As well as enjoyment, the orchard has an important role to play in teaching children about the food they eat. Today, many children are divorced from the source of their food. For most it simply comes from the supermarket, a continual stream of whatever we want from all over the world regardless of the season. We need to awaken children’s awareness of how good locally grown seasonal produce can be and what better way to do this than through a community orchard?

Nothing equals picking an apple straight from the tree and eating it.

So, it was on a rather bleak May evening we stood ready and waiting for the first of our young visitor groups, the 1st Steyning Brownies, to arrive. If we had been apprehensive about the weather it certainly did not deter the group of excited children coming across the cricket pitch towards us.

For the next hour with the help of a brightly coloured parachute, a handful of coloured beads, a bucket of sawn discs, an old brace and bit drill and a quiz the children became involved in the orchard. They listened to the orchard sounds, hunted for the answers to a quiz and made ‘necklaces’ from wooden discs decorated with orchard images to take home.

Just for an hour the orchard became their world. As they left I hoped they had enjoyed being there, enjoyed it enough to want to return in the future, maybe to pick an apple from one of the trees and eat it straight from the bough.
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