The Enchanted Garden is a project based in Crossens Nursery School in Southport in Sefton, Merseyside. Inspired by the early years centres in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the vision of the project was to enhance the outdoor area, with an emphasis on starting from young children's ideas and interests. The aim was to focus on the process of learning, not the final product.
The initial stimulus was a visit to the local Botanic Gardens, where the children enjoyed a multi-sensory experience in beautiful surroundings. From their discussions on their return, it became obvious that the children were interested in birds, so this became the focus of the project.
The Enchanted Garden project places a strong emphasis on the importance of giving young children the time to learn through an emerging curriculum and illustrates how such principles underlying early years education in Reggio can fit comfortably within our own Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage.
Time to learn
The Enchanted Garden project led to remarkable outcomes, with children achieving at very high levels in all six areas of learning. This was particularly evident in children's personal, social and emotional development.
Time was critical in enabling Doris Spence, the nursery nurse who worked alongside the children throughout the ten-month project, to really listen to them in order to document their growing interest in birds.
The children live in Southport, where an abundance of birds can be seen migrating for the winter, and having this experience in addition to their visit to the Botanic Gardens prompted a discussion about where the birds were going and whether, if they were going far away, they would be tired.
The children contemplated this and the project culminated in fabulous bird tower sculptures in the nursery garden - a place for the children's birds and local birds to meet and rest. The children designed and made their birds independently, using wood offcuts and woodworking tools.
They were confident and competent in using hammers, saws, hand drills and glass paper - so much so that they won the confidence of the staff, and the woodworking area is now an area of continuous provision. The children can access this area independently just as they can sand or water.
Revisiting experiences
Making time to revisit experiences with children was also an important message from the project. For example, John's initial thoughts as he made his wooden flamingo to perch on bird towers was, 'The flamingo will look inside the water to find a fish. He has to close his eyes.'
Documentation was used at regular intervals during the project to help the staff prepare the next learning opportunities for the children and to help children reflect and extend upon their prior thinking. When Doris revisited John's flamingo with him some time later, he had developed his previous thinking.
He said, 'My bird has very sharp claws so he can catch the fish... the flamingo will look inside the water to find a fish... I like his feathers and do you know? The feathers are where he hides his wings when he doesn't want to fly. He has long pink legs and a pink face... they've got lots of pink all over.'
Doris confirms the need for reflection. When the children used graphite pencils to record their experience of their visit to the Botanic Gardens at the beginning of the project, she noted how for some children, the language did not come at the time of drawing, but when she revisited the experience with the children a week later.
The graphite drawing of a conker found in the gardens by a three-year-old child is a good example. The representation was done in silence. The language - 'This is a conker with an outside and a conker inside. It's stuck inside, it's safe' - came a week later. Could such observational skill have been achieved with the practitioner bombarding the child with a barrage of questions?
Learning from children
In line with the beliefs of Reggio, this project was never about steering young children through an abundance of objectives and ticking them off one by one as they were achieved. It was totally child-centred - looking at what we could learn from children and how we could use what we had gleaned to meet their individual needs to move them forward.
Doris's observation of Caitlin illustrates this perfectly. The children were given the opportunity to paint their own birds. Caitlin was interested in the bird's beautiful colours rather than its form. Due to the unfolding nature of the project, Doris put no pressure on her to produce an end product that would fit a static learning objective (to paint a recognisable bird). Instead, she gave Caitlin the time to explore the paint and experiment with colour mixing, as she views this as a valuable piece of children's learning.
This way of thinking and working with young children is advocated in the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage when it says, 'The process of learning is important for young children. They need time to explore if they are to be satisfied with a piece of learning. Sometimes this may mean that the practitioner needs to be flexible in what they had planned for the session' (page 20).
Unfortunately, we live in a society where what is measurable is considered most significant. This has meant that with even the youngest children, we are in danger of entering into a content-driven, target-setting, tick-list culture. It is crucial that we ground ourselves with 'real' reasons and beliefs for doing things, and these should be the principles that underpin our work. In a busy school or setting, the things that can be easily overlooked are the very things practitioners are there for - the children!
Children need time to learn and to develop a love of learning, and if we want them to become lifelong learners, we have to get it right in the early years. As the Enchanted Garden project has shown, with time on their side young children can become confident, competent and powerful learners.
Further information
* For more information about the Enchanted Garden project e-mail cis@ csf.sefton.gov.uk
* See also www. seftonchildcare.org
References
* QCA/DfES (2000) Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage
