Shannonlethbridge

Context

• Early childhood education
• Nature play base focus & child led learning
• Monday 20/03/23 to Friday 24/03/23 groups
• Morning activity

The bubble bath in the trough was a hit! Children enjoyed cleaning the animal toys and getting them dirty again! Children could identify what it is to be clean and what it is to be dirty. 

We ended up making an imaginary mud farm, where children were encourage to play with the toy animals in the mud and then wash/scrub/brush them in the bubble bath afterwards. This was the start of creating a positive practise of cleaning and taking care of our objects in our environment. We could possibly build on this and create a space to put all the clean toys!

The downside of this bubble bath & mud experience  is that often children accidentally (or maybe purposefully) splash water on each other. This usually leads to tears and children wanting to get change into dry clothes right away! I often explain to children that it’s ok to get wet, your clothes will naturally dry in the sun and we can get change into dry clothes when your done playing with the bubble bath & mud. 99.9% of the time children feel good about getting their clothes a bit wet. 

So, where to next?

We could:

• have a clean bucket or container to put the clean toys in, which would help teach children to respect their environment and the toys they play with. 

• practise getting our clothes wet by washing, hanging and drying old rags or doll clothes on a washing line or on the fence. This experience could possible help children notice how the sun dries our clothes and that it’s ok to get your clothes wet every now and then!

• invite children to investigate whether or not the shape of a bubble wand will change the shape of a bubble. I could possibly bring in a few old wire hangers to use as a bubble wand and for children to manipulate the shape of it.

• Set up an encounter to investigate objects that float and sink.

• experiment with bubbles & colour through bubble art! This would be a lovely art activity to do in the Atelier room and an opportunity for children to artistically represent their learning journey!

Links to  EYLF outcomes:

Learning Outcome 1: A strong sense of identity

• Children learn to interact in relation to others with care, empathy and respect

Learning Outcome 2: Connection to and contribution with their world

• Children develop a sense of belonging to groups and communities and an understanding of the reciprocal rights and responsibilities necessary for active community participation
• Children become aware of fairness
• Children become socially responsible and show respect for the environment

Learning Outcome 3: A strong sense of wellbeing

• Children become strong in their social and emotional wellbeing
• Children take increasing responsibility for their own health and physical wellbeing

Learning Outcome 4: Confident and involved learners

• Children develop dispositions for learning such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination and reflexivity
• Children develop a range of skills and processes such as problem solving, enquiry, experimentation, hypothesising, researching and investigating
• Children resource their learning through connecting with people, place, technologies and natural and processed materials

Learning Outcome 5: Effective communicators

• Children interact verbally and non-verbally with others for a range of purposes

• Early Childhood Education
• Nature play base focus & child led learning
• Wednesday 15/03/23 & Friday 17/03/23
• Morning & afternoon activities

Some mornings children love to do role play using the canoe as our main prop. The children use their imagination to spot out giant sea creatures, in particular a shark!  One child loves to ask “a shark coming?” And I either reply with a yes or no. If the answer is no, then we all pretend to swim to the green hill to safety, where children say “we are safe up here”. Then we eventually swim back to the canoe and the role play repeats over and over and over again. 

So, Where to next?

To build on this role play I would love to slowly introduce different characters to broaden the story line. Maybe a child would like to be the shark, captain of the boat, an Angler, a mermaid, a boat mechanic or some other magnificent sea creature! I wonder where the story will take us with some simple props? 

I find the afternoons a bit tricky. This is when children wake up from their nap. Reading books has been great, however not all children are in the mood to sit still on the mat. 

I noticed the other day that one child was very interested in doing some drawing after she woke up from her nap. Then all of a sudden more children started to gravitate towards the drawing table as well, while some children sat on the mat for story time. 

So, where to next?

Since this group of children are fascinated with the canoe and shark role play game we play in the morning, I thought we could have some sea creature photographs on display for children to draw inspiration from. Or perhaps have some ocean themed zentangles for children to practise their fine motor skills. 

Links to  EYLF outcomes:

Learning Outcome 1: A strong sense of identity

• Children feel safe, secure and supported
• Children learn to interact in relation to others with care, empathy and respect

Learning Outcome 2: Connection to and contribution with their world

• Children develop a sense of belonging to groups and communities and an understanding of the reciprocal rights and responsibilities necessary for active community participation

Learning Outcome 3: A strong sense of wellbeing

• Children become strong in their social and emotional wellbeing
• Children take increasing responsibility for their own health and physical wellbeing

Learning Outcome 4: Confident and involved learners

• Children develop dispositions for learning such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination and reflexivity

Learning Outcome 5: Effective communicators

• Children interact verbally and non-verbally with others for a range of purposes

Context

• Early childhood education
• Nature play base focus & child led learning
• Thursday group 16/03/23
• Morning & afternoon activities

I recently started facilitating child led experiences at a nature play based Early Learning Home. A place where children have the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in nature, whether it be going on a bush walk or getting muddy feet in puddles.

Today it had been raining all day. This made for the most engaging learning encounter. Children were building up the confidence to splash in deep puddles and being ok with getting muddy fingers & toes.  They were also expanding their concentration level through hours of water play.

Overall, It has been rejuvenating to have the time & patience to play with children,nurture them & follow their interests. I’ve learnt that it is vital for myself to play with children to build meaningful one-on-one connections with each individual child. Today, along with the children, I played in the rain, got my clothes drenched (as I forgot to bring my rain jacket) and got my gum boots all muddy!

So, Where to next? 

I would love to start setting up intentional learning encounters , where children could potentially begin to investigate: 

• being dirty and how to be clean. We could fill up the trough with bubble bath & play with the bubbles! We could even get the children to wash some dirty toys & muddy pots in the mud kitchen!
• Whether or not the shape of a bubble wand affects the shape of the bubble? I’ve been noticing that the children are obsessed with the bubbles in the sink after washing their hands with soap.
• how water changes sand into mud

Inspirational books to go with the intentional learning encounters:

• Mrs Wishy Washy’s farm
• Wombat stew 

Links to  EYLF outcomes:

Learning Outcome 1: A strong sense of identity

• children feel safe, secured and supported.

Learning Outcome 2: Connection to and contribution with their world

• Children develop a sense of belonging to groups and communities and an understanding of the reciprocal rights and responsibilities necessary for active community participation
• Children respond to diversity with respect
• Children become aware of fairness
• Children become socially responsible and show respect for the environment

Learning Outcome 3: A strong sense of wellbeing

• Children take increasing responsibility for their own health and physical well-being.

Learning Outcome 4: Confident and involved learners

• Children develop dispositions for learning such as curiosity, cooperation, confidence, creativity, commitment, enthusiasm, persistence, imagination and reflexivity

Learning Outcome 5: Effective communicators

• Children interact verbally and non-verbally with others for a range of purposes

The final session for ‘Let’s Get Native Gardens!’ was an absolute blast! The girls set up shop near the junior playground and took advantage of the ice-cream fundraiser stall next door. This worked out perfectly, as we didn’t have enough time to advertise our stall, but everyone who came down to get ice-creams couldn’t help but browse our products!

By the end of lunch time we had almost sold out of all our products and made a profit of around $250! All of which will go towards establishing their very own ‘Native Garden Club’ for the year 2023, buying more resin to make more products and most importantly purchasing native plants to plant at school!

We even got to present at the ‘Future Schools Tour’ event, where teachers from across Australia sought inspiration from student-led learning experiences!

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THE GLOBAL COMPETENCIES & LINKS TO THE CURRICULUM

Through student led inquiry I can see that most, if not all, of my students demonstrated advanced ‘Global competency skills’ and advance skills & knowledge in other learning areas. Here are the reasons why:

Collaboration & Digital technology

Students used multiple online applications to collaborate and communicate with one another. Some students collaborated on Canva to create a ‘Native Garden Club’ logo and price list of the market stall. Students also used Google docs to write a persuasive letter to the Head Teacher to get permission to run a ‘Native Garden Market stall’. Naturally, there were numerous students that took on leadership roles for each aspect of their project.

Communication & HASS research skills (questioning & researching)

Students were able to develop their own questions based on their acquired knowledge of native gardens. They interviewed Ned from Manuk who answered their questions and gave students the information they needed to continue with their project. Students took in the information from Manuk and was able to embed this knowledge into their persuasive email/letter.

Students were able to clearly communicate to other students, teachers and experts why they want more native gardens at their school (i.e. to attract native birds and insects to their school, as opposed to just having pigeons flying around).

Students used the Canva app to create an information flyer to spread their message.

Students also created resin coasters and keyrings with dried wildflowers to raise awareness about the importance of growing native plants at their school.

Creativity, inquiry & entrepreneurship, HASS research skills (analysing), Chemical Science and Science Inquiry Skills.

Students did their own research and experimentation when it came to making the wildflower resin moulds. We discovered that certain flowers reacted differently to the resin, where in some cases we witnessed a chemical change (i.e. the kangaroo paws turn from red & green to black & yellow). We also identified the different states of resin (i.e. liquid to solid form) and irreversible changes in the resin and flowers. Students also took into consideration how to stay safe when using resin (e.g. wearing gloves & a face mask at all times).

Students also researched other ‘native garden’ projects happening within their school. We interviewed a former student who was apart of the Tucker Bush garden project. She gave us insight into what had already been done and what needs to be done to maintain the native gardens and to get more native gardens at the school. She suggested starting a ‘Native Garden Club’ to ensure that the current and future native gardens get taken care of. 

Critical thinking & Problem solving and HASS research skills (evaluating)

At the ‘Future Schools Tour’, students were able to evaluate their own thinking by answering questions from visiting Teachers! Students were able to explain the ‘meaning behind their resin products’ and ‘how native gardens will benefit wildlife as well as improve student wellbeing!’.

Thank you to my wonderful students for making this inquiry so interesting, fun and hands-on! I’m a very proud of you all and I can’t wait to see what the ‘Native Garden Club’ will achieve next, in 2023!

PART ONE: PREPPING FOR A MARKET STALL FOR OUR PROPOSED FUNDRAISER

Last week one of my students brought in a whole basket of wildflowers from her garden and I brought in some resin! I’ve never seen students get to work so fast in my entire teaching career. They went straight to work, preparing the resin, making flower arrangements and experimenting with adding water colours to the resin. Some of us started to make mini figurines out of polymer clay, which included sculptures of native bees and birds we might attract, as well as, tiny little pot plants. All in preparation for a native garden market stall for our proposed fundraiser!

As we get more and more into our project, our why becomes stronger. We would love to have more native gardens at our school to increase the variety of birds & insects that come to visit us. So far we mostly get pigeons……

After our busy hands-on session, we then walked around the school looking for suitable places and spaces for an urban native garden. To be honest, we weren’t feeling very optimistic as their was very little space and the spaces we did find looked like impossible areas to grow anything! 

We then returned to class and put together some questions for our guest speaker from Manuk! In part two you can read their questions in bold text and a description of Manuk’s answers to those questions in italics.

PART TWO: BUILDING COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS WITH MANUK

Student question:Can you give us some tips when it comes to designing native gardens in urban areas?

Luckily to our rescue, we had Ned from Manuk open our eyes up to the possibility of transforming these dead garden spaces to beautiful native gardens! We focused on one particular area by the pool cornered by glass gates. He spoke about how the glass gates are actually creating more heat, making it hard for non-native plants to grow, hence the dead tree stumps in the picture below. However, native plants that are use to the heat would do well here. He also gave an inspiring talk  about how this would be the perfect example to show the school how having a Native Garden Club would be helping the groundskeepers as we would be working to grow plants in tough to grow areas!  He also advised us that it’s better to plant in winter when there’s plenty of water.

Student question: Is there a way to make the growth of plants faster?

Ned also shared tips on how to plant native plants and how to make plants grow faster. He brought in an Old Man Saltbush (native plant) to demonstrate his planting technique and as an example of a fast growing native, as not all native plants are fast growing. He also mentioned that native plants are inexpensive and that with our fundraiser we could easily raise the funds to buy our own native plants to do more planting !

Student question: What is your position/role in Manuk? And how old were you when you became interested in native gardens?

We found out that Ned is the owner of Manuk and also works for Manuk. One of his goals is to educate people about regenerating the land through native gardening in urban areas. He also told us that he grew up in the country and from a very young age he has been connected to nature.

After our chat with Ned, the girls went straight back to work creating more products for their proposed market stall for our native garden fundraiser! We already have some students reserving products, so we may need to create a waiting list !!

DEFINING OUR BIG QUESTION

This week our brains were certainly working on overdrive. We had to harness our inner fire and think deeply about what we are doing and why? First we reviewed our big questions that we developed last week and it ultimately came to down to this:

“How might we encourage others to become involved with creating more native gardens at our school?”

We applied the ‘Chalk talk’ routine to define our BIG QUESTION. We also researched the Sustainable Development Goals and identify links with SDG 15 (Life on Land), SDG 3 (Good Health & Wellbeing) and SDG 13 (Climate Action). 

We then interviewed a previous student who was involved with the current Tucker bush garden. She explained the process her group took and recommended that we start an after school club to ensure the longevity & care of existing and future native gardens at the school.

REFINING OUR SOLUTIONS

We refined our solutions/ideas from last week and put together a plan of action! Our goal is to have a pitch, video presentation and our prototypes ready in 3 weeks time! Wish us luck!

Solutions	Fundraising ideas	Raising awareness ideas
Create a Native Garden club. This club will be in charge of the upkeep & maintenance of current and future native gardens, and, fundraise money for native gardens at our school.	Sell & make resin badges or key rings with petals and leaves from native plants taken from our own gardens.	Create postcards with potential native plants that we can have in our native gardens.
Raise awareness about the benefits of having more native garden spaces within our school community.	Sell native plant pots with wildflower seeds.	Give each class a sample pot with wildflower seeds (e.g. everlastings)
Create a video/documentary for our pitch presentation.	Wear something green for a gold coin donation	Make a digital banner for students’ to see on their online portal.
Interview and learn from older students who have experience with planting native gardens at our school.		Make an educational Kahoot about native plants.
Design native gardens suitable for the spaces/places available at school.		Create a digital survey about having more native gardens at school.

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SO WHAT’S NEXT?

– We will begin to work on creating prototype ‘resin badges or keyrings’, ’sample pot plants’’ and ‘postcards’. 

– We will walk around the school to search for potential spaces/places to have more urban native gardens within our school, and, come up with our worst native garden design! Hopefully some magnificent design ideas will come out of this process!

This is the beginning of a new student inquiry into ‘why’ we need more native gardens in urban areas! My students and I will be applying the design thinking model to guide our thinking and to help us develop a powerful pitch regarding ‘why we need more native gardens within our school community’.

To spark interest we watched a short clip of Patrick Wake (from Millennial kids) talk about his postcard project.

My students were then inspired to raise awareness about their native garden project, here are just some of their ideas:

– Make nature themed keyrings to hang on school bags. Use resin or polymer clay to make them.

-Create their own postcards with paintings or drawings of native plants we should grow and with a detail description of what wildlife these plants will attract or provide habitat for. 

-Make plant pots for each classroom to have to remind them of the native garden project. Make the plant pots out of recycled newspaper or egg cartons. Grow native herbs or easy to grow wildflowers (e.g. everlastings). 

To further build #empathy we did some #slowlooking at the native plants in the school’s Tucker bush garden and noticed all the little critters that depend on this native garden for habitat, such as the bees, butterflies and minuscule caterpillars 🦋🐝🐛 . We also did some note taking and drawing to record what we were ‘noticing’. 

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After spending some time in nature, we returned to class and did a ‘1-2-3-4-hi 5’ sharing strategy. We individually wrote down ‘why’ it is important to us to have more native gardens at our school, walked around the classroom for 4 seconds, hi-fived the closest person, shared our thoughts, swapped post-it notes and repeated the steps. We then had a whole class discussion about ideas that were similar and ideas that surprised us. From this we were able to brainstorm our ‘BIG’ question that is derived from our core purpose.

We also started to brainstorm more ideas. At this point we were all very much fired up with passion and excitement.

Our ideas included:

-Raise funds needed to buy the native plants 

-To maintain the current Tucker bush garden (e.g. run an after school club and talk to a previous student of the school who was involved with the planting)

-Who we can write letters to, to implement change?

-Who can we ask for expert advice? (E.g. so far we have grandparents that are botanist and older students who have experience with greening the school)

-Create a survey/online petition to get more native gardens at our school 

And lots more that I can’t remember on the top of my head, but luckily we started recording our ideas on a shared doc so next week we can pick up from where we left!

So what’s next?

-Define our ‘big question’ 

-Draw links with the Sustainable Development Goals to strengthen our ‘why’ /‘purpose’

-Start talking to experts 

-Develop small questions to research 

-Come up with a plan to put together a strong pitch by a certain date.

-Refine our ideas on how we will spread the message to other students

This year I have been deeply reflecting on improving student engagement through implementing the following behaviours in myself:

• listening and asking my students what they want to learn, how they want to learn and how they want to show their learning?

• Responding to what my students are saying through taking immediate action.

• Respecting the pace that each of my students are learning at.

This last particular point jumped out at me when one of my students shared a heart-warming reflection with me. She wrote “When I played the ukulele I was happy and afraid then it all went good!”. I asked her why she felt ‘afraid’ to play the ukulele and she responded to me saying that “I felt afraid because I thought if I got it wrong I would have to do it over and over and over again until I got it right, but I got it right so I felt really happy playing the ukulele”. I was really pleased that she felt safe to share her feelings with me and that she has been enjoying learning how to play the ukulele!

We also worked with plasticine that same day. We all noticed how soft the plasticine felt and how squishing it made us feel relaxed. Some of the students went on to play the ukulele, while other students practised mindful drawing. One particular student started writing her very first song! She was eager to share her song with her classmates, so we did!

We went to her classroom to performed her song. I accompanied her on the ukulele and she held the beat with an ‘egg shaker’. After her performance, she shared her learning journey by referring to her scrapbook journal. Her peers were keen to find out more about her songwriting and offered to help come up with a song title! This was a really special moment to witness. 

I’ve also started noticing how I feel when I allow my students to follow their own interests and learn at their own pace. I feel content and at ease, which is something I struggle to feel come reporting time. Something I would like to change in the future!

Furthermore, I will do my best to practise an additional behaviour which is to:

• Trust the process of student learning.

In my eyes the stages of learning look something like this:

• Explicitly teach skills in the beginning
• Exploring & practising the skills
• Expanding on students’ interests that involve applying our new skills
• Exhibiting our learning in a way that makes sense to the individual student.

Overall, I want learning to feel exciting for everyone involved!

I’ve recently been asked to develop a series of wellbeing experiences for a small group of children. To help guide the direction of the wellbeing experiences, I first got to know the students and their interests. Majority of the children love scrapbooking, building things and playing music. We then had a chat about the possibility of learning the ukulele, having our own scrapbooks to record our journey and doing some arts & crafts. All of the children were really interested in learning how to play the ukulele and writing their own songs to improve their wellbeing. Students started to ask questions like “how does music make people happy?” and “how can we write our own songs?”. Together we came up with our overarching big question:

“How might we use the ukulele to improve our wellbeing?”

This first wellbeing experience forced to me to really think about my own creative writing process and the process of how one of my own ukulele students (from China) came to the point of writing her own songs? I also asked myself, how is songwriting/playing music linked with wellbeing? I know playing instruments, singing and writing songs is a form of release for me, but why and how? I ended up teasing out my thoughts and mapping the pathway that lead my Chinese student to writing her own songs. This helped me make connections between songwriting, learning the ukulele, wellbeing and learning with inquiry.

After I mapped out my thoughts, I realised that it was important for me to practise what I teach. So I decided to do the ‘Chalk talk’ activity to help me define my role as a facilitator during these small group ukulele & wellbeing experiences. This is something I would also like my students to do next time I see them!

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My students and I also started to develop our very own Emotional Charter. First we look at the Mood Meter chart -by Marc Brackett – which the children are very familiar with already and picked 5 moods that we want to feel when we play the ukulele. We then grouped the similar moods together.  

Once we have defined our ‘big question’ I think it would be easy for my students to identify “behaviours” we can have and “actions” we can take to maintain our desired mood or shift our mood so that it is aligned with our Emotional Charter. 

Since facilitating these experiences I have also been reflecting on my ‘mood’ and ‘building my emotional vocabulary’. Right now I’m feeling ‘peaceful’ because I get to teach ukulele at a like-minded school and I’m also feeling ‘grateful’ for having the opportunity to do something I really love!

I’ve also been fortunate enough to attend the wellbeing nature experiences/excursions with the Year 1 and 2 students. At these nature experiences the Year 1 and 2 students are given plenty of time to explore nature’s wonders and get their hands dirty building towers and ephemeral art! The Year 1s and 2s have also been connecting to local Aboriginal culture by learning Noongar words like bilya, which means river!

Perhaps these nature experiences could be linked in with my small group ukulele & wellbeing experiences!

A student journalling about the stick tower we built next to the river.

After listening to the voices of my students it was clear that they are very much invested in protecting our Tucker Bush garden that was recently planted in the Junior Primary playground area. Collectively across all three Upper Primary classes they came up with their own ‘how might we’ question, being “ how might we protect our Tucker bush garden?”. In previous weeks we already started discussing this, however I felt that it was really important to get the children to record their ideas down before the school holidays. One thing they may forget their ideas (although I highly doubt this due to their enthusiasm) and secondly this is sadly my last term with them so all this information will be passed onto their new STEAM teacher.

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Although I’m really sad about leaving my students, my teaching cup will forever be overflowed with all of their magnificent ideas and self drive to make their school and local community a better place to learn and live on. From re-vamping the ‘standard health & recreational warning sign’ to revamping our Tucker Bush care signs. It’s truly been a wonderful and meaningful journey, teaching with a purpose and listening to the student voice, which I hope to continue wherever I end up teaching next!

The children were able to take in ‘kind’ critique from the WA Senior Scientific Officer (who said our warning signs would alarm the public) and from our audience at the Herdsman Lake Discovery Centre (who asked us to spread our message in a positive way). We also gained feedback from the Junior Primary students who voted purple & pink as their favourite colours, which will be taken into account when re-vamping the current Tucker bush care signs.

Together, we negotiated a new success criteria for our Tucker Bush Care signs. The aim of our success criteria is to improve the impact of our current Tucker Bush care signs. This links directly with the Year 5/6 evaluating stage of the design & technology processes and production skills!

As a whole group we decided that our Tucker Bush Care signs need the following to be impactful:

• less writing because most of the Junior Primary children aren’t fluent readers yet!
• Include symbols & pictures so that it is easy to understand.
• Use bright colours to draw the attention of the Junior Primary students and especially use purple & pink colours in accordance with their survey results.
• Focus on actions we want the Junior Primary students to do to take care of the Tucker bush garden, rather than trying to scare them away from the Tucker bush garden.

Some students are working on improving our current Tucker bush care signs by coming up with easy to understand symbols to go with actions we want the younger children to take during playtime: 

Some children are working on a storyboard for a comic book story. The moral of the story is to protect and care for the garden so we can all enjoy eating the Tucker bush plants! The Upper Primary students would like to read their stories to the Junior Primary students in the mornings during their class time. The reason behind this is that they would be calm enough to retain the information in comparison to during their playtime.

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I also have a few students looking at new robotics that the school could buy to help promote their message. Their idea is to put a sign on top of the robotic car to remind children of their Tucker bush care duties (such as water the Tucker bush plants or watch your step). I told the students this would be a great opportunity to apply their persuasive letter writing skills again! They will need to identify their target audience, which in this case would be the new STEAM teacher.  

After noticing their interests in robotic cars I showed them a video of children doing the Sphero Chariot Challenge, which they absolutely loved! So perhaps this could be something they could do next term, which could then lead the children into building a prototype robotic car to spread their message during playtime. This would definitely give their chariot design real-world meaning and purpose. It could also show their new STEAM teacher the benefits of having a remote control Sphero car.

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