Land, Water and Air

20/9/2020

Last week we resumed a bit of normality. It seems like we took another inch towards it although I am highly aware that this may be a false sense of reality. We are, after all, only one positive test away from our nursery bubble closing for 2 weeks. Fingers crossed though that we can ride this wave and see that off.

It was a heartening experience seeing all the children return, both old and new. Everyone by now is used to queuing, to keeping a mask at the ready, handwashing and even having their temperatures taken. Which was great as, as it turns out, this is precisely what was needed to bring the children into the nursery garden.

And after a week of refamiliarizing ourselves with some of the old routines, and adapting to the new, we were able to make some headway into our topic for this term – Migration!

We have begun with the basics, or as Julie Andrews would sing, “Let’s start at the very beginning...” and she is right; it is a very good place to start.

The children were shown the land and water globe and were great at identifying what it was called. They labelled it ‘a planet’, ‘the world’ and also ‘Earth’. We spoke about how land, water and air are vital to our planet and life on earth. One child pointed out that they bring their own water bottles into nursery every day. I asked if they are reminded to drink water by their parents. They all emphatically shook their heads and in unison told me ‘no, no, no!’ to which I then asked them if they could remind me, seeing as they were expert water drinkers.

We looked at our ‘land’ ‘water’ and ‘air’ jars and matched some picture cards to each jar. There were some interesting and imaginative ideas and cute conversations. ‘Where does the train go? Land, air or water?’ One child quickly replied ‘In the air!’ The others were baffled. Some looked confused and others thought it was funny. I smiled, ‘Fantastic! So if I catch a train to London, will it fly there?’ and ‘That means if we look carefully we can see train tracks in the sky!’ There were guffaws, cries of ‘no’ and fun was had by all. We clearly were all enjoying the joke which led to other deliberately wrong answers when we explored the difficulties of sea turtles living on land, people living in the sea (we would need gills and fins) and hot air balloons flying in water.

Through our exploration and reasoning, and through our intentional mistakes we became drawn to the right answer. It was a lovely little exercise in sharing ideas and thoughts.

Here follows a little selection of pictures from the week. Enjoy!