The Journey Home by Frann Preston-Gannon

Installing bird feeders, bird and bat boxes or hedgehog houses, as well as building bug hotels are all fantastic activities to welcome wildlife. Planting bulbs and sowing wildflower patches will entice pollinators and birds to your setting. This will make them feel proactive and encourage their nurturing instincts.

If you can encourage wildlife into your early years learning landscape, there will be plenty for children to explore and look after.īetter still, you can involve the children themselves in creating those habitats. What happens to the waste we put in a compost bin? What happens to seeds when we sow them? 3 | Create welcoming habitats What happens to litter if we drop it? What happens to our rubbish when we throw it ‘away’ or recycle it? So, this is a perfect time to introduce the positive and negative impacts they can have on the environment with some intriguing questions and thought-provoking explorations. 2 | Choose your impactĬhildren in early years are exploring cause and effect, and the consequences of their actions. This provides a neat link to home and a point of discussion for group time, too. You could have a nature table or shelf that the children can contribute to with treasures found during weekend and after-school adventures.

If they experience the outdoors as much as possible, and in all weathers too, they’ll want to look after it without very much encouragement at all.īringing the outdoors in is also important. But how do we nurture that curiosity into kindness towards the natural world? Helen McGonigal investigates… 1 | Spend time exploring natureĬhildren will protect the things that they love.

Young children are naturally curious about the world around them.

The Journey Home by Frann Preston-Gannon