Outdoors: STEM – From the ground up

quick wins

• Set up a good old-fashioned naturetable to display plant treasure. Collect leaves, flowers, pieces of bark and other parts of plants, for further examination. Make leaf rubbings and collages using the collected leaves.
• Snip stems of sticky horse chestnut buds or forsythia, place them in a jar of water and watch them open up in the warmth.
• With a large white sheet on the ground, shake a shrub or tree. Watch what drops onto the sheet. In summer, it will generate excitement as there will be many interesting insects to see.
• Grow your own mint – help children snip a stem of the plant, and then carefully remove all the leaves apart from the topmost ones. Place the stem in a jar of water on a windowsill and wait.
• Collect a range of large leaves. Ask children to cut them in half along the centre, then glue one half onto paper. Can children draw the ‘missing’ half?
• Plants grow naturally towards a light source: glue vertical flaps of cardboard inside a shoe box to create an ‘obstacle course’, then pierce a hole, about the size of a penny, at one end. Place a sprouting potato at the other end of the box and seal the lid. After a few weeks, the potato sprouts will have navigated the maze on their way to escape into the light.
  
  

continuous provision– plants every day

It’s not just access to elements of the natural world that children need – they also need the freedom and time to interact with nature.

• If your outdoor space has little greenery, then planting should be on your priority list. Even grass can be grown in a raised bed, so if replacing hard surfaces is out of the question, begin to collect a wide range of large pots and planters and fill them with plants to provide interest all year round.
• Revisit the Nursery Worldseries ‘the plants in your street’, from 2023: a different plant was featured each month, with hundreds of ideas for how to grow them and use them playfully in your setting. All the articles are on the Nursery World website.
• Child-sized gardening equipment is essential and we can’t emphasise enough the importance of quality over quantity. Cheap plastic and metal equipment will break, bend and rust; it will cost significantly more and trigger frustration when the tools aren’t up to the job. Instead, invest as and when you can in professional-quality, appropriately sized pieces, such those by Joseph Bentley, Burgon & Ball or Bulldog, which will quite literally last a lifetime. As a minimum, you will need a hand fork and trowel, a spade, a fork and a rake.
• Children will want to dig, so provide areas that children can access daily with their gardening equipment, and other spaces that you set aside to allow plants to grow.
• As landscape designers, we learn that ‘a weed is a plant in the wrong place’ – so a giant redwood in California (or Scotland, it now seems!) is a magnificent specimen; planted 5m from your house, it’s a weed. Likewise, dandelions on a bowling green are weeds, whereas in your grass they are a jolly addition to children’s daily outdoor experiences. So let things grow unless there’s a very good reason why they shouldn’t – even nettles are valuable in the right place (see the Nursery World article from February 2023).
• Aim for a variety of plants and plan for improvements: at least a few trees; grass; flowering shrubs; fruit and vegetable crops; spring bulbs; flowers for picking, pressing and displaying.
  
  

in the moment – nature walk

If the trick with ‘in the moment’ planning is having the knowledge and confidence and creativity to riff on spontaneous events, then the planning needed for in-the-moment plant play is to truly know your outdoor space. Take the time to make an inventory of the plants in the garden, learning their common and Latin names, their key characteristics (such as when they flower, whether they have fruit, if they are edible, which insects or animals rely on them) and take photographs all year round. Remember to include grasses and weeds – you probably have quite a few of them! That way, time spent in the garden can become a nature trail, allowing you to share information about different types of plants as children notice them or comment on seasonal changes.

Having gardening tools handy outdoors can also facilitate extending children’s in-the-moment interests – for example, snipping a plant’s stem or branch to examine it in more detail, or burying a seed or nut you’ve found.

Take the opportunity whenever you’re outside to show children how plants support wildlife through the provision of habitats and food for insects, birds and small animals. Observe how different creatures interact with plants and talk about the circle of life/ecosystems. Remember to emphasise that humans are also part of the natural world and we depend upon plants for our very survival, from trees capturing harmful pollutants (e.g. carbon dioxide) and releasing oxygen and water through to growing food crops, building materials and medicines.

Enhancement – In addition to gardening equipment, curate a library of non-fiction titles related to gardening, and keep them outdoors, along with ID and spotter sheets, in a watertight box where they can be accessed easily. Spotter guides are the most obvious books to source, but I recommend purchasing second-hand or asking for donations as they won’t last too long outdoors – just keep replenishing as needed, and keep a good variety so that children have choices about the format and style of book they want to access.

Resources that will add to enjoyment and interactions include flower presses (though you can find DIY instructions online), magnifying glasses and microscope, windowsill cold frames for growing from seeds; vases or jam jars for displaying cuttings or wind-blown finds. Pooters and examination tubs will allow children to safely catch insects to examine close-up.

resources

• Pappus Project: www.pappusproject.eu
• Learning through Landscapes has an award programme called Local School Nature Grants: https://ltl.org.uk/projects/local-school-nature-grants
• Try the Muddy Faces outdoor hub, www.muddyfaces.co.uk, and Creative Star, https://creativestarlearning.co.uk, for practical ideas.
  
  

planning ahead

Explore the important role of sunlight on plants. Choose a variety of heavy objects and source some weed-suppressant plastic or tarpaulin. Place the objects on a patch of lush green grass, and cut the plastic into a recognisable shape – lay that on the grass too and weigh it down. What you are doing is restricting sunlight, preventing the grass from photosynthesising. Try to avoid moving the objects for at least four weeks. After that time, lift them away and observe and discuss the changes that have occurred. Revisit the yellow grass every few days to watch it quickly turn green again, once the sunlight is restored.

Introduce edible plants such as herbs and root vegetables, and spring flowering bulbs. All of these can be grown in pots or planters if you don’t have space for a veggie plot. We like the idea of planting some bulbs or flowering shrubs specifically for picking – clearly label these.

Taking a trip to a park or a neighbour’s garden is always valuable. If you can get permission, collect samples of both similar and different plants to compare back in your own setting. Take a tablet to take photos and a tape measure and metre rule to take measurements – children might like to make their own markings on clipboards.

Grow beans in a jam jar; the runner bean is placed between the jar and a piece of kitchen paper that’skept damp. Slowly, the bean will germinate. Make an experiment from this by placing the jam jars in different places – indoors and out, in sunlight, shade and darkness, by a heat source and in the fridge. Once you have shoots, plant them outside and grow beanstalks.

Glossary: Seed, root, shoot, stem, leaf, flower, fruit, nut, catkin, environment, biodiversity, botany