Tree bathing mindfulness
Take time throughout the year to just lie under your trees and quietly contemplate the leaves, branches and sky above. Some children will enjoy the feel of the grass or soil beneath them; offer blankets if they don’t. Coach them to take long, deep breaths, feeling their ribcage move up and down, noticing the ground pushing up against their bodies. Can children hear their own breathing? Feel their heartbeat? What sounds can they hear in the environment around them?
Celebration days 2024
There does seem to be a celebration day for every cause, and our plants and animals are no different. By now I hope you have a good idea of the plants in your street – if so, here are a few events to celebrate in 2024:
- International Day of Forests: 21 March
- National Dandelion Day: 5 April
- Be Nice to Nettles Week: 14-25 May
- Oak Apple Day: 29 May
- World Conker Championships: 13 October
- Remembrance Day: 11 November
- Tree Dressing Day: 7 December
And don’t forget No Mow May, and Bloom in June – let your grass grow long and see what appears!
Barefoot walking
I love barefoot walking, and for very young children, we know that barefoot is best. By walking without shoes, children’s sensitive feet learn to anticipate and handle different surfaces, test and improve their balance and sense the world around them through touch.
Underneath your trees and around your planted areas are great places to try barefoot walking as there is plenty of sensory information for children’s feet to process. Try to go barefoot outdoors at least once a month, whatever the weather. In spring and summer, ask yourself whether children could play outdoors without shoes. Walk under and around your trees and plants, feeling the changing seasons underfoot.
Coppicing and harvesting
Willow and hazel can be grown as shrubs or trees, just by the way you prune them. Consider planting a few ‘bare root’ specimens over the winter. Goat willow (also known as pussy willow) is a fast-growing plant with lovely fluffy buds and catkins. A pack of 20 small hedging plants should cost no more than £20 – you could plant them all, then thin them out over the years so you just have four or five bigger trees, or plant them close together to form a willow wall or sculpture. Hazel is similarly good value.
You actually help them thrive by cutting back some of the stems every year – coppicing. This will produce hazel rods and willow withies for art and STEM projects.
Stick stomping
Try to find really chunky sticks that are a bit taller than the children – this is to give them a good sense of scale but not be overwhelmingly heavy or unwieldy. Stand in a circle and try a few stomping exercises:- Practise stomping – hold the stick vertically with two hands and bang it on the ground in a simple rhythm.
- Hold the stick vertically in one hand and raise and lower it. Then move all the children apart so they can raise and lower their stick horizontally without poking their neighbour. Ask them to notice what a difference this makes to how the stick feels in their hand.
- Can children hold the stick vertically in one hand and throw it back and forth between hands?
- Make tunes – stomp out patterns and rhythms and ask the children to listen and copy.
- I wrote all about sticks for Nursery World: https://tinyurl.com/NWsticks
Tools and resources
To be proper gardeners and custodians of their environment, children – just like adults – need proper tools. Please don’t be tempted to buy plastic or ‘toy’ tools – they are a waste of money and are usually ineffective and lead to frustration. It’s better to build up a collection of good-quality tools over time. You might still be buying a couple of trowels or spades in five years’ time, but the tools you invest in now (and store properly when not in use) will still be in tip-top condition. There are many brands, but the junior versions of well-known names such as Spear and Jackson, Bulldog and Burgon and Ball are reliable quality.
Plant stories
There are sooooo many storybooks about plants, I won’t recommend one book, and instead suggest that you:
- Organise a book swap with other settings. Ask if you can borrow storybooks or non-fiction texts and let them share yours for a while.
- Write a year’s story about a tree in your own garden, or about a well-known local tree. Each month, add a new chapter, featuring things the tree has seen, what it is looking forward to in the coming season, what it remembers from its youth, who its favourite passers-by are, who lives in its branches. You could give your tree a rich fantasy life (I still recall the inhabitants and adventures of The Faraway Tree) with children illustrating the story.
- Make tiny fairy/animal doors for the base of your favourite tree, and make up stories about who lives there.
Grow poppies
Poppies are easy to grow and are outrageously blousey. Seeds can be sown directly into soil, but it’s fun to watch the tiny shoots appear, so sow seeds into shallow trays on a windowsill and then plant them out once they become strong little seedlings. The bigger the poppy, the better, for me, but there are many varieties and the Gardeners’ World or RHS websites are great places to go for advice on which to choose.
Once your poppies have flowered, you can collect the seeds and save them to replant, use them and their cases in art projects, or even use them in cooking – ironically the ‘opium poppy’ is best for this!
Fun with fungi
Fungi aren’t plants or animals. Instead, they are their own ‘kingdom’ of life and they are fascinating and a little bit frightening – even experts can get identification wrong, but if you stick with ‘don’t pick, don’t lick’ outdoors, you’ll be reinforcing a clear message for children. Having said that, once a year it’s worth going on a fungi foray, and mid-autumn is the perfect time.- You’ll need a sharp paring knife, a plastic or paper plate, a large piece of white paper and vinyl gloves.
- I also highly recommend jewellers’ loupes for examining plants and fungi up close.
- Go on a foray – look at rotting logs, on tree trunks, in grass, under piles of leaves – in October and November there are mushrooms and toadstools all over.
- Take just one example of each type you find. If they have stems, try to gently prise them out of the soil sothat you take some of the thread roots too. Place them gently onto the plate and then transport them all to a table, where you can arrange them on a large piece of white sugar paper.
- Check out Nature Detectives for ID sheets, or the Collins Mini-Gem book, and check how many you can identify. Use the loupes or magnifying glasses to help children look very closely at the features of the fungi you have – they are very different in colour, textures, shape and even smell. Without making children unnecessarily fearful, we do need to remind them not to touch.
- Dispose of the fungi – they can be composted, but before you do, make spore prints with them – look online for instructions. They create beautiful marks.
Grow, forage, cook
So many of the hedgerow plants and common garden shrubs have edible parts. ‘Don’t pick, don’t lick’ should be your mantra for any plant other than ones you’ve given children explicit permission to collect and eat. Some unusual plants for your next wild feast might be:
Rose hips, blackberries, sloes, damsons and elderberries for delicious sauces and preserves.
Many flowers can be made into cordials or syrups – elderflower, wisteria, lilac, lavender and rose petals, etc.
Dandelion leaves and nasturtium flowers are edible with quite unusual tastes – are your children willing to try them?
And don’t forget…
The Pappus website is stuffed with hundreds of ideas for learning and play with plants. Although it is aimed at KS3+, there are plenty of springboards for play that will work well with younger children, and you can find them with the search function at: www.pappusproject.eu