A walk on the wildside

I guess that is what my teenage daughter, Femke, will call our hike today. As New Zealand celebrates a public holiday, I took my six year old daughter, Esmee, for a treasure hunt along the Korokoro stream. To my astonishment, Femke, bored from having to much screentime on her hands, volunteered to join us. So of we went. Richard Louv writes in his book "Last Child in the Woods, saving our children from nature deficit disorder" the following:

"Even as children and teenagers become more aware of global threats to the environment, their physical contact, their intimacy with nature is fading"

Is my teenage daughter really out of touch with nature? My skepticism soon turned to optimism. She left her Ipod and cellphone in the car, and she was first out on the track. She was the only one to climb a tree, and the first to spot the wild duckling down the riverstream.

She found a spider on her sweatshirt and she managed to skim some stones across the water. When we found a fern with some spores, she gave Esmee a biology lecture about "asexual reproduction" as she called it. I must admit, I was impressed.

We hang over and looked under bridges to see if we could find tadpoles. We run and jumped, stopped to listen to the lark in the sky and the crickets in the blackberry bushes. We spotted a fantail and several butterflies.

Femke helped Esmee look for treasures. Esmee, with her child's eye sees beauty in many little things. She found a bone with teeth, a beautiful gem stone, a plant complete with roots and leaves, some moss, "seaglass" as she calls it and "sharp rocks that people used as tools in the old days, when there were apes".

A play on the water edge to float some sticks topped of the fun.


A six year old and a sixteen year old, both with a magic eye for wonder that only a child will have.

Caught in the web of life

At our preschool we have our lunch outside, on the veranda. This is followed with free play outdoors. The children often use this time to bake mudcakes, build dams in the rain puddles, play hide and seek in the tall grass or just roam around. We finish this time with quiet time for meditation and relaxation, before we get back into our busy preschool programme routines.

Meditation time is a very special time of the day, enjoyed by all. We take out our mats and pillows on our deck and lay or sit down to listen to a special story or some quiet music. Sometimes we listen to the howling wind, or the rain on the veranda roof or we move our mats onto the grass and watch the clouds.

Today our meditation time turned out quite different. As we were listening to a spider story, a cabbage butterfly flew up on our deck, swirled around and got caught in a spider web up on the veranda roof. We watched it struggling, trying to get out. It wasn't for long when the children started to feel sorry for the butterfly and wanted to rescue it. "We don't want it to die". "We want to put it in the garden". A discussion evolved, the needs of the butterfly versus the needs of the spider, a lesson about the web of life. The children were adamant that the butterfly should live and a rescue mission was executed.

The butterfly must have been traumatised by the experience as it flew immediately into another spiderweb. This time a waiting spider immediately attacked it. Quickly the children again took the butterfly out of the web and carefully placed it amongst the flowers in the garden. One lucky butterfly, and a not so lucky, hungry spider. In the child's eye, an act of compassion and guardianship.

You can read a children's version of the Web of Life story told by a common garden spider on the Kidsplanet website.

Leeks in our garden

One of our children brought some leeks for our garden to preschool and we have been busy preparing the garden and planting the leeks.

Gardens are great for teaching the children the cycle of growth. The children plant seeds, watch them sprout and care for the plants. At our preschool, this is followed with harvesting and food preparation.

Gardens provide great opportunities for the children to learn about nutrition and health. Children love to try new foods, especially when they have grown the food themselves or have been involved in harvesting the food. A gardening programme allows children the opportunity to make food choices based on new experiences.

The garden at our preschool is a place where our children are able to explore and discover in an interactive, hands-on environment. It teaches them about growing vegetable crops and they experience first hand the life cycle of plants, from seed to harvest, and begin to understand the relationship from garden to table.

We often turn our harvest into a nutritious meal, a curry, a savoury muffin (with eggs from our free range chickens) or a chunky vegetable soup. The final celebration takes place when we all sit around our peacepole, enjoying our home made meal.

Our garden has created many life shaping memories. It is a place where our children can marvel at the wonders of plants and their importance in our lives.

Often when we work in our garden we get sidetracked as we investigate the creatures we share our garden with, exploring how they live and how they help our gardens grow.

Earthworms are one of the creatures the children are fascinated with. They play a significant role breaking down organic matter into nutrients for plants and aerating the soil with their burrowing.

When a child finds a worm, we encourage them to look and feel gently, how moist are they, as they breathe through their skins. How do their muscles stretch and contract to move and which end is the head?

Gardening is a rewarding way to connect with nature for children and adults alike. We are looking forward to nurturing our leeks and other vegetables in our garden as summer arrives.

Is there magic in a tree stump?

Yes, absolutely. Ask the children at our preschool. We have several tree stumps in our garden, ranging from “old” to “fresh”. The old ones are the magic ones.

Have you ever taken time to stop and examine them? Have you ever made the effort to peel of some of the decomposing bark? A whole new world embarks behind the bark as one of our children found out when he peeled some of. “Look, a slug, look over here, a slater, oh what is this?”, and on it went. We had a great time, marveling at the little creatures we found in an on the tree stump.

Exposure to the natural world is essential for a child’s well being. Nature inspires a sense of wonder, the beginning of wisdom. You can share nature with children in your own backyard. Creating a space full of wonder and adventure doesn’t require a landscape architect or field knowledge. It does require imagination and creative thinking as you will have to think outside the square of a tidy manicured lawn. Logs and tree stumps are a great resource to start with. They will serve several purposes. They can be used for gross motor skills, like balancing, climbing, and jumping from stump to stump. They can be arranged in different sizes in a circle or semi-circle. They can be used to sit on to have a break or become a place to dream. They can be used for hiding places for insects and worms.

A simple tray with a magnifier glass and a set of small garden tools provides hours of exploration and discovery fun. Our tree stumps at our preschool are not rooted in the ground, but sourced from other places where they have been left as firewood off cuts. Different species provide different textures, smells and sizes.

Tree stumps are a great resource to introduce children to sensory nature experiences, giving them hand-on interaction and providing a place for nature discovery. If you are looking for a space in your garden that will provide experiences that live forever in children’s memories, look for tree stumps.

A garden grows more then just plants, it grows people

A new book: Outdoor classrooms, a handbook for school gardens

It is Sunday morning, and I am writing this post in Taupo. I am sitting outside our rented bach, overlooking a reserve. The sun is making its way up the horizon, the sky looks promising blue and the lake is glistering in the distance.

All I can hear on this beautiful calm Sunday morning is the song of the thrush in the tree next to me, some other birds across the valley, a bumble bee visiting the clover buds in the grass and some flies buzzing around.

How long this will last I don't know, but people will soon arise, cars will get started, lawns will get mowed, boats will get launched and the birds will get quiet. I am enjoying this moment to the full while it lasts.

Yesterday I visited the Ecoshow. My favourite stand during a show or exhibition is usually the bookstand and this is no different at the Ecoshow. The stand had several books available with the main focus on organics, permaculture and transition towns, but my eyes quickly caught the pile of books at the back of the table that looked brand new. Indeed, "Outdoor classrooms, a handbook for school gardens" is hot of the press from Australia. It is written by Carolyn Nuttall and Janet Millington, two primary school teachers and permaculturists with over 60 years of teaching experience between them, many of which have been in garden-based learning.

The book explores the benefits of school gardens and their value in nurturing children's relationships with the natural world. It gives plenty of ideas, plans and designs for developing and maintaining a school garden and suggestions on how to get started. What is clear from the beginning is that this is not a book about the traditional school gardens as we find them at schools across the country, the forgotten little patches in the back corner of a playground. Instead, this is a book about developing and maintaining a permaculture or sustainable garden as a formal part of an outdoor classroom and a living curriculum. This is where the book has my attention, with its extensive list of "outdoor learning adventures". This collection of ideas and concepts will add to our own ideas, which we have applied in our own preschool garden. Our preschool garden is an essential part of our classroom and is the main component of our living curriculum, see my post "Our beautiful garden, a magical place". You can also read more about our garden and our outdoor naturalised environment on our preschool website. Another valuable part of the book is the section about curriculum connections. Although Australian based, the information can easily be applied to the New Zealand environment and the workshops and units can easily be adapted to your own situation and environment.

The book is illustrated with sketches and drawings, and a handful of black and white photographs. Some full colour photos would have enhanced the book. I haven't finished reading the whole book, but it already has given me new ideas I can't wait to apply some of them in our garden. I can recommend the book to any teacher who'd like to embark on the journey of setting up a school garden as part of a living outdoor curriculum or for those who'd like some fresh ideas and inspiration to take their school garden to the next level. Together with our own book, "Our journey as an enviro preschool", the two books will be a great resource and put you on the pathway of setting up a sustainable garden as part of a naturalised outdoor school environment.

The "extinction crisis" and the importance of nature experiences in early childhood

As I checked the news this morning, headlines focused on the financial rescue plans in Europe and the US. Nationally, New Zealand has woken up to the news that budget deficits of billions of dollars are predicted for the next 10 years. However, there was more doom in the news, not making the big headlines as the tumultuous global events of the past five weeks but nevertheless just as, if not more, important. An “extinction crisis” is under way, with one in four mammals in danger of disappearing because of habitat loss, hunting and climate change. Read the New York Times article here. National Geographic writes “The elevated threat level has even sparked a Dow Jones-like index of endangered species, designed to spot troubled species before it's too late. But, despite the inevitable comparisons to the financial crisis, there appears to be no bailout plan in sight for threatened life-forms, experts say”. Here is the article.

These headlines confirm once more how important it is that our children experience and appreciate the natural world. They are the future stewards of the earth. In a world increasingly threatened by the effects of human behavior, we need a custodial generation of young people committed to finding solutions to ecological problems. This makes nature education critically important at all levels in school, but even more so in an early childhood programme. Nature, as part of environmental education, is a lifelong process that starts with the child’s first experiences in the natural world.Because many young children spend so much of their time in early childhood settings, the outdoor space at the setting becomes the place they first develop a relationship with the natural world. For us, as early childhood professionals, it is important we really think about the outdoor environments we create.

Loving the rain

It's the first week of the spring school holidays. The weather has been unpredictable. One day it is fine, the next day it is wet and cold. Today is a lovely spring day and I visit our preschool with my six year old to feed the pets. It is late afternoon when it suddenly starts raining. I hurry along. My six year old, however, slows down, and starts walking around the garden, enjoying the drips on her face and hands. They are slowly getting bigger and she watches the growing puddles. By the time we are finished feeding, we are running, as the rain is now heavy. Soaking wet we climb in our car. On the way home she says “ I love this weather, the rain is my favourite, can I play outside when we get home?”

Her thirteen year old brother has different feelings about the rain. He and his friend are “nintendo kids”. Some time ago, on a rainy day, seeing the huge puddles in our quiet cul-de-sac street, I suggested they could ride their bikes and try out the big puddles. Surprisingly they agreed. They disappeared next door, to pick up the bike, but were back within minutes. “I am not allowed," said the friend “,my dad told me not to be silly, it is raining”. I was speechless. Minutes ago I was quietly celebrating what I thought was a victory, getting these boys playing outside in this kind of weather . Now I felt defeated. Before I could even respond the boys settled back onto the couch with a game controller in their hands and their eyes glued to the screen once again. “Maybe you can play Settlers, or another board game”, I tried, but my words were lost. This battle is bigger then I expected.

At our preschool, things work differently. The last few weeks have seen some very rainy weather, with flooding around the country. After several days of rain the puddles in the garden were calling out to the children. When you are three or four years old, they are very hard to resist. We decided to expose the children to a “rainy experience” and let them explore a very different garden; wet, flooded and muddy! Dressed in raincoats, hats and gumboots and with origami paper boats, we went outside. The puddles were great to sail our boats, hmm, paper doesn’t last that long in the water… The logs were no longer just a balancing obstacle, now they functioned as a bridge, necessary to cross the huge puddle that had developed. And the stepping stones really were stepping stones. We got wet, some of us got muddy, but the memories will last. Even the wild ducklings like our puddles.