This week, we have extended upon the children’s interest in the natural world by participating in our first Nature Play SA incursion, observing and documenting the growth of our caterpillars into chrysalis’ and butterflies, as well as taking nature inspired walks in the school grounds. On Tuesday, the children were actively engaged in an incursion called ‘Nature Arts and Crafts’ where they were introduced to Cameron and Maria who used Zoom to share a range of nature based songs, stories and games. The children really enjoyed the story ‘the Magic stick’ and finding their own ‘magic’ items in the garden, including one that was smooth and one that was bumpy. They then used their collections as well as sticks, leaves, seedpods, rocks, yarn and other materials to design their own natural masterpieces. These included:

Eva – “It’s a instrument thing. There is a drum and a guitar and a piano and you press them to make music.”

Xavier – “It’s a plate with a leaf and a stick going in there (inside the yarn).”

Jaylah – “It’s my pretty sticking. There is lots of leaves on there.”

These were shared with Cameron, Maria and Oscar and Emmett Standing (who joined us in the Zoom call). They were very impressed with our creations, as we were with Oscar and Emmett’s wonderful designs. We look forward to our next incursion on Tuesday 26th of May.

This week we also saw the wonderful transformation of our caterpillars into both Chrysalis’ and Butterflies. We noticed that there was a very big butterfly in the enclosure and the flowers inside didn’t look like they had much pollen left to feed it. When asked what we could do to help look after the butterfly (and perhaps find it some food), the children had some wonderful ideas, such as:

Tesi – “Get some flowers and take them outside to the flowers, just the butterflies.”

Imogen – “We could go for a little walk and release the butterfly.”

On Thursday, we took the children on a walk into Holy Family to release the biggest butterfly into the flowerbeds. They took the opportunity to not only release the flowers but also collect new flowers for our soon to be butterflies, as well as some beautiful coloured leaves for future arts and crafts experiences.