During the tour of Rookery Farm, we will use the land as an outdoor classroom to explain the links between farming, conservation and food production. Fieldwork will enable pupils to gather data in a variety of ways on the tour.  These will vary according to the group’s needs. They can include studying soils, hedgerows, flower rich field margins, beetle banks, listening to nature (creating a sound map), field sketching, photography, poetry, alongside building written and numerical evidence.

Children will have the opportunity to feed hens, collect eggs, study different grains and learn more about where their food comes from.  A farm walk can become a scavenger hunt on which the children seek out and identify different flowers, leaves, trees and birds.

Older pupils can investigate soil health through carrying out worm counts, testing soil pH and looking at the soil structure.  Pupils are encouraged to work in groups to evaluate the farm’s contribution to enhancing biodiversity.  Pitfall traps can be set in a transect across and field to enable pupils to count the number of insects at different locations.  Quadrats are available to measure the numbers of different flowers in flower-rich margins across the farm.  By the end of the visit the pupils will have a greater insight into how their food is produced while linking it to conservation and nature.