Blind School Pupils Build Den in Hospital Woodlands
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- Sight Scotland students from the Royal Blind school took part in outdoor learning at the neighbouring Astley Ainslie hospital gardens, which the source says contain over 2,000 trees and are open to the public.
- Margon, who leads the outdoor sessions, guided the pupils in building a shelter by stretching a tarpaulin on a rope between two sturdy trees, with the source noting the difficulty of finding trees that were both robust and spaced far enough apart.
- Kearyn and Adrianna, both 13, described sensory engagement with the woods — feeling warm sun on wet ground, tracing textured bark that Margon identified as old ivy vines, and hearing birds and rustling leaves.
- The pupils also constructed smaller dens for toy animals from materials real animals might use, then collected twigs and leaves on the walk back to repurpose in their school sensory garden for an art project.
Why it matters: The piece highlights how blind and visually impaired pupils access nature through non-visual senses — touch, sound and smell — using a hospital green space as an extension of the classroom. The sensory-garden follow-up shows the outing feeds directly into creative work back at school, and the authors' own pride in the experience centres disabled children as active interpreters of the natural world rather than passive recipients of it.
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