Story details

I'm a teacher at a nursery school in Bradford and last spring I was lucky enough to go to Bangladesh with a Bangladeshi friend and her family. Before I went I talked to the children about where I was going. One of the things we looked at was a photograph of a field of rice growing and the children's first reaction was to say that's not rice, rice isn't green.

I brought back some rice seeds. When I got back we planted them in a bucket of compost. I'd looked up on the internet how to grow them, we put about 4 or 5 inches of compost in the bottom and dropped the seeds on top and kept it covered in water. We left it in a really sunny position in the classroom right by the window and waited. After a couple of months very little had happened there were just a few shoots coming through. Then fairly suddenly in the following few weeks a lot more came through and the rice grew and grew up over the top of the bucket. We looked at it with the children and linked it in with writing and drawing.