Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) and West Berkshire Council have launched an innovative pilot project to teach children how keeping themselves healthy can help the natural world.

Wild West Berkshire teaches pupils about eating healthier food, taking more exercise, and how that can help wildlife and tackle climate change.

BBOWT officer Emma Hine is working with 218 children aged seven to ten across nine classes at the Willows Primary School, Newbury and Lambourn CofE Primary. She is visiting each class three times - in the autumn, winter and spring.

The schools sent questionnaires to families at the start of the year asking how much fruit and veg they ate, how much exercise they did and how many times on average they visited a natural space each week. The hope is that, by the end of the project, they’ll be doing more of all three.

Emma, a trained teacher, says she’s delighted by how excited children had got about the idea of eating their vegetables:
"In the autumn we talked about kale, purple-sprouting broccoli and parsnips, and I expected them to say 'I don't want to eat vegetables' - but they were saying 'I really want to try this when I get home.”

"I think they like the opportunity to talk about it with their friends - passing the vegetables around, saying 'oh my gosh!' and 'have you seen this one?' I'm not saying you have to eat it, I'm saying ‘you can try this if you want.”

"The kids are really engaged and keen to share their ideas, and when I went back to visit for the second time they remembered a lot of what we'd been doing even if it was just smelling a turnip, it's something that feels different."

As well as befriending vegetables, the children also play a host of games to help them learn how being healthy helps the natural world.

In the playground they play wildlife activity bingo, where Emma holds up a picture of an animal, tells the children some facts about it, then they all repeat an action imitating that animal. Scuttling sideways like a crab, swooping like an owl and leaping like a frog are fun ways to learn about nature, but are also a fun way to get valuable exercise which the children learn is good for their physical and mental health.

In the classroom, children are asked to name every mode of transport they can think of to get to school, from walking to hovercraft. Emma writes all the answers on a board, but some are on the left and some are on the right: at the end of the exercise the children have to work out the difference between zero-carbon travel such as roller-skating, and the more carbon-intensive methods they called out - such as submarine.

In another activity, the children play a Price is Right-style game where Emma shows pictures of fruit and veg such as bananas, pineapples and oranges, and the children guess whether the carbon footprint is higher or lower than the one before.

The project has been entirely funded by West Berkshire Council.

Cllr Graham Bridgman, West Berkshire’s Executive Member for Health and Wellbeing says:
“This is a brilliant initiative that goes straight to the heart of children’s curiosity and desire to learn new things. Engaging children in this way can be a lifelong game changer – if healthy habits are adopted early, they can stay for life. This is also an excellent opportunity for children to recognise the links between looking after their own health and looking after the health of the environment around us.”

The Wild West Berkshire pilot will finish at the end of May, and the council will then examine the results to see how they could help schools across the district and beyond to keep teaching children the idea of 'one planet' health.

For more ‘one planet’ health ideas you can try at home, go to bbowt.org.uk/actions