NATURE

Alison Heseltine, early years development officer at the Alliance, shares ideas for connecting with nature using found resources

As early educators we want children to have the opportunity to engage with a wide range of experiences that will support their learning and development. The free and found resources that we find in nature’s treasure basket provide this for us in abundance.

Whether you have a forest on your doorstep, a small paved area or a park down the road there are treasures to be found – leaves, flowers, feathers, sticks, pine cones, mud and bark, to name but a few.

I love that by involving the children in collecting the resources themselves it gives them a greater sense of belonging. These are their treasures that they have found themselves and that they are actively using, taking ownership of their own learning.

One of our children’s favourite activities was inspired by a story from my own childhood that really captured their imaginations – Famous Seaweed Soup by Antoinette Truglio Martin. This is a story about a trip to the beach, where all the ingredients needed for seaweed soup are collected up in a bucket and all topped off with a final flourish and a stir using a seagull’s feather.

This story has gone on to inspire so many famous soups with children deciding on their own unique recipes using what they are able to find outdoors. Each time, without fail, our adult eyes are opened to the unique way that children see nature. What to us might seem mundane, to them is an object of awe and wonder – and a vital soup ingredient!

Watching the care that they take choosing and preparing ingredients and using their motor skills to mix and pour, listening in to the language they use, seeing their social skills develop as they negotiate with each other and problem solve and, best of all, being invited into their play, is one of the privileges of being with children in their early years.

One of my favourite moments was observing a child adding some ‘seasoning’ to her seaweed soup using some rosemary from one of the pots in the garden followed by a peppermill to add hole-punched leaves as a stand in for freshly ground pepper. No greater thought and care could have been taken – even in the famous Master Chef kitchen itself!

By observing this play and giving time for children to extend their thinking, the seaweed soup was then further developed when another child decided that they needed more. Using mud – nature’s playdough – they fashioned bread rolls just as they had seen on a family trip to a café.