Nature Kindergarten

As with all Kindergarten classes, Nature Kindergarten students will meet with their teacher this week for a parent-teacher-student interview.  The Nature Kindergarten ECE will also be part of this interview process.  This allows the educators to get to know the students, and gives parents and students a chance to visit the classroom and ask questions.

Nature Kindergarten educators, Lisa Lockerbie and Erin Van Stone, school principal, Maureen Lauren, and several Nature Kindergarten parents and students were featured on CHEK 6 news (educational issues) yesterday, September 4th.  Visit http://www.cheknews.ca/ to view the clip.

An important aspect of the Waldkindergarten programs in Germany is an attempt to avoid purchasing and playing with manufactured toys.  Being in nature, one quickly realizes that there are endless objects in nature that can become a toy.  Just stop for a moment and reflect on the many uses a stick might have in a child’s imaginative play.  A sword?  A fishing rod?  A magic wand?  A pony to ride on?

Our Nature Kindergarten educators and steering committee are trying to be mindful of this approach when thinking about our equipment purchases for outdoor and indoor programming.  The items that have been purchased for outdoor learning are practical, tool-like objects such as magnifying glasses, nets, and squishy buckets.  For the classroom, we are trying to bring natural materials inside and make environmentally sound purchases.  For this reason, we selected several furniture items from Natural Pod (http://naturalpod.com/).

Thank you to community member, Werner Kuret, for preparing wooden blocks out of scrap wood pieces and sticks found in nature.  We look forward to seeing what the Nature Kindergarten students will build!

Natural Wooden BlocksNatural Wooden Blocks

Open the Door to Possibilities Conference will take place at Royal Roads University in Colwood, BC on Saturday, October 20th, 2012.  For more details about this nature-based conference, please follow the link below.

Open the Door to possibility Conference

Many thanks to Trevor Miranda of South Cowichan Eyecare in Cobble Hill for donating a pair of sunglasses for each of our Nature Kindergarten students.  Thank you for your generosity!

We are thrilled to be working in collaboration with Bridgitte Alomes and the Natural Pod team to design a cart for the Nature Kindergarten pilot.  The cart will be used to transport supplies and gear to and from Sangster Elementary School.  It has been superb to design this cart with input from Bridgitte, enid, Lisa (Nature K teacher), and Erin (Nature K ECE).

The Nature Cart

Those of you who participated in our Nature Kindergarten Orientation in June will recall that we were keen to receive your feedback to guide us as we develop future learning opportunities.  enid wrote the post that follows, and together we determined that this blog was a better forum, than email, to invite you to participate in a discussion question.

Dear Building Our Compass folks–

We had a great orientation and it was wonderful to meet you all and hear what you are doing…very inspiring! We are a community of learners and thinkers. Thank you for all your attention, thought and willingness to engage. There are lots of interesting projects going on.

I am going to bring up a discussion question…if you have time it might be nice to hear from you to carry the discussion further.

One person noted and others may have thought that our Friday with the naturalists and their pre-planned activities presented a challenge to the previous two days that focused on a play-based, emergent curriculum. How do pre-planned curriculum ideas/activities connect to an emergent curriculum?

There were lovely ideas from “growing up wild” and the activities may well connect with ideas that children find of interest. It seems to me that it is still a model that presumes to know what children want to know/should know….activities can certainly stimulate children’s thinking and questions. Children’s responses to the activities can be a guide to future ideas. Some children like to name and classify but others may want to experience the joy and wonder of being outside…and these are not
mutually exclusive…and one is not better than the other. We need artists, scientists, lover of the outdoors and community members who enjoy their place in the world….there are many skills needed outdoors and we bring many gifts to our relationships outside.
I am interested in your feedback to this idea. I hope to share with the Project Wild folks some different ideas that move away from child development and linear learning and suggest another model that embraces a more holistic way. They might be interested in ideas of listening to children and promoting ways to think together with children and how they might encourage teachers to do this. Who we think the child is influences how we perceive them and how we feel they should learn.

Would love to hear your thoughts….  enid

Entrance to Forest School Site

Popping popcorn kernels at forest school

Canadian teacher, April Gutensohn, operates and teaches within a successful non-profit forest school just outside of London, England.  The forest school provides programs within the Ham Common woods for preschool-age as well as school-aged children.  What a treat it was for me to join in and participate in two sessions last Wednesday!

The children were most excited to celebrate their final day at forest school by building a small fire and popping popcorn over open flames.  Hopefully this dialogue will give you a sense of the enthusiasm I witnessed as children watched the popcorn kernels begin to pop …

“April, I just saw one [pop]!”

“Oh, look!”

“It sounds like fireworks!”

“It worked!”

“Now we can blow out the fire.”

For more information about April’s forest school programs, please visit http://www.treehouselearning.co.uk/

Last week, enid and I had the pleasure to meet and learn from Dr. Frances Harris who is based at Kingston University in the UK.  Dr. Harris contacted me, via this blog, in May and happened to be traveling on Vancouver Island this summer with her family.  She has both practical and academic experience with the forest school movement in the UK.  After presenting a lecture to masters students at Royal Roads University, Dr. Harris and her family spent a leisurely evening with our families.  It was wonderful to make this international connection, and we look forward to staying in touch with Dr. Harris.

Some more information about Dr. Harris’ research and research interests …

I am committed to public engagement with environmental science, and have just completed a second edition of “Global Environmental Issues” published with Wiley-Blackwell in February 2012. I have always been interested in looking at comparative work between the UK and Canada concerning the children and nature / outdoor learning area. I am intrigued by the interest in Forest Schools, as I had always thought Canada, with its focus on summer camps (which we don’t have much of here) would take a different approach to nature education. I am based at Kingston University, which is in south London, and my webpage is http://sec.kingston.ac.uk/about-SEC/people/academic/view_profile.php?id=36. I work at Kingston 3 days a week, and in my time off I lead outdoor learning activities.

We were thrilled to recently receive a $60,000 grant from the Vancouver Foundation and a $2,500 grant from Success by Six.  A huge thank you to both of these organizations for their support!