What a lovely task at Holy Trinity Lamorbey Primary School this evening!

After a short run from our meeting point at Sidcup Leisure Centre, Jane the vice principal, explained her plans for turning a stack of pallets into bug hotels in the school's outdoor learning area.

With ideas like this it's well deserved that Jane was recently named Bexley Eco Teacher of the Year 2026, and the school was awarded as runner up in the Bexley Eco Primary School of the Year. (And it's fair to say that we are proud our work at the school has made a small contribution towards this.)

Following Jane's instructions, we set about collecting twigs, branches, leaves, fir cones and bricks from around the grounds, and tore up some cardboard boxes. Then we started building: filling an upside down pallet with the natural materials and cardboard, placing a brick in each corner as a spacer, positioning another pallet on top... and repeating several times until... voilà... we'd made a new wildlife habitat!

We had time to build a second one before packing up and celebrating Ashton's 100th good deed. That's a whole lot of helping out in our local community, and it felt right that Ashton should wear our superhero cape to mark the occasion!

In the coming weeks, pupils at Holy Trinity Lamorbey Primary will continue adding more material into the bug hotels, and we'll be back in a month to add roofs and wire casing to stop the contents falling out.

If you fancy spending some fun time outdoors in a midweek antidote to a busy day at work, come along and join us.

This month's visit to Holy Trinity Lamorbey Primary School was a fun inside - outside double act.

Inside, Team Paint picked up classroom decorating where we left off last time. With a couple of walls already done, we wanted to finish the rest to leave the space looking clean, warm and ready for learning.

Outdoors, Team Green took advantage of the warm-ish evening, sawing branches from a felled tree into short lengths that will be used to make wildlife-friendly mini dead-hedges 🐛🪲 and cosy homes for hedgehogs 🦔.

The hour flew past and we packed away paint, brushes and rollers and collected up saws and loppers, then posed for the traditional team photo in the fading light.

Just before leaving, Vice Principal Jane offered us seedling cherry trees that pupils had grown from stones collected in last year's bumper crop of fruit from the tree in their outdoor learning area. Susan, Caroline and Simon headed home, very pleased with these unexpected gifts 🪴.

Over the summer months we're looking forward more outdoor projects at the school... fingers crossed some of them line up with this year’s cherry season! 🍒

It was full-on painting action at our monthly session at Holy Trinity Lamorbey Primary School last night.

On our previous visit we tackled two rather bold feature walls — one bright yellow and one deep claret — swapping the brash colours for something a little warmer. We're still debating whether the shade is technically 'cream' or 'magnolia', but whatever its official name, the school loved the new look so much they asked us back to paint the rest of the walls to replace their stark white.

We got busy with brushes, rollers and trays of paint, working in teams across the two classrooms. Impressively we mostly managed to get it all done within our allotted hour. Caretaker Andy will handle the high bits that were just out of our reach.

A second coat might still be needed, but the transformation is already clear to see.

Keeping a close eye on proceedings throughout was Brecon the school dog, who enthusiastically supervised, posed for photos and treated us to a few tricks. There were also a few musical interludes, with spontaneous renditions of songs from the musicals. (Oliver! and West Side Story proved particularly popular choices 🎵🎶.)

We'll be back again in April, so if you'd like to join the fun, come along! No painting experience required and we might actually settle the debate about the paint colour if we remember to check the label on the tin. Oh and singing is entirely optional.

After a short run for some of us, we all had a busy, chatty hour at Holy Trinity Lamorbey Primary School.

The bright yellow and heavy maroon walls in three classrooms are now on their way to a warm new paint colour. And one of the book cupboards is looking much tidier.

We're mid-makeover... come and join us next month* to keep it going!

• No decorating experience needed.

Last month we cleared the contents from an art cupboard at Holy Trinity Lamorbey Primary School.

Tonight we were back with Jane, the vice principal, to dismantle the big shelving unit in the middle of the cupboard. Cue screwdrivers 🪛, saws🪚and hammers 🔨, and impressive team work in a confined space.

As the cupboard got emptier, the corridor outside got fuller with the demolition debris, so we found a trolley and did several trips to the skip in the car park.

Next door we took on the gentler task of tidying the computer room. With laptops, headphones and mice neatly organised it looked spick-and-span for classes to use tomorrow.

Cupboard swept, corridor cleared and computer room in order, we posed for a team photo and it was time to say goodbye to Jane and head home.

I'm constantly amazed by how much a posse of GoodGymers can get done in just an hour. And always with such good cheer and enthusiasm.

Looking forward to next month's visit to help tick off more tasks on the school's long to-do list .

For our midweek task this week, we were back at Holy Trinity Lamorbey Primary School where we tackled the Art Cupboard of Doom 😱.

Some of us ran from the leisure centre, while others made their own way there. We were greeted by the school’s vice principal, Jane, and her gorgeous dog Brecon, who spends one day a week helping out in classrooms.

Brecon kept a close eye on our antics as we got to grips with the task at hand: emptying the long-neglected, overstuffed art cupboard, ferrying everything into a spare classroom next door ready to be sorted and reorganised by the school's art teachers.

And there was certainly a lot to move!

We came across every kind of art, craft, and D&T material you’d expect to find 🎨🖌️⚙️✂️, and some unexpected items too, including two vintage weather-display boards (likely from the 1970s), a small bongo drum, and a little paint-smudged teddy that had clearly slipped behind the shelves and been long-since forgotten.

Between trips, we took turns throwing Brecon’s ball along the corridor, keeping her happily occupied in an endless game of fetch.

Just one hour later, after plenty of back-and-forth and the occasional exclamation from Jane, “Oh, so that’s where that went", "I was looking for that last week!” and “Why would anyone have kept that?!”, it was mission accomplished. We'd cleared the cupboard and filled a stack of bin bags with bottles of dried-up plaster paints, set-hard paintbrushes, and rock-solid modelling clay.

In the new year, we hope to return to take down some of the old shelving and give the cupboard a fresh coat of paint to complete its Cinderella-like transformation into a clean and usable space once more. ✨