Here at the Nurture Nursery, we encourage as much outdoor play as possible. We were incredibly lucky to spend almost every day outside over the summer months last year. The pre-schoolers enjoyed eating outside, growing fruits and vegetables in our planters, experiencing seed to plate in detail, going on walks in the local community, and enjoying the happiness that nature brings. We found that the children thrived, were happy and content, explored our garden’s freely, looked after wildlife and experience mark-making in lots of different ways. It was a shock to the system when the weather began to turn!
Inspired by our ethos and love for outdoor learning, we came across the OMEP-UK Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Citizenship Award by SchemaPlay. The ESC Sustainable Citizenship Bronze Award was split into three pillars: Social and Cultural Education, Environmental Education, and Economics Education. This was a partnership between us and our families, enhancing the children’s understanding of what it means to be a sustainable citizen in our world today. The children were given various i-Care Booklets that offered parents topic discussions, books, and activities to consider when thinking about being a sustainable citizen. Alongside this, we had to submit an audit tool which allowed us to assess our resources, acknowledge children’s rights and what it means to be a citizen, as well as understanding the importance of supporting literacy and numeracy.
Here are the areas we reflected on:
Social/Cultural
The audit tool emphasised on the importance of children being offered the opportunity to recognise themselves doing activities, recognising how they felt in those moments. The children love looking through their learning journals, observing and commenting on what they are doing in each photo, celebrating their friendships and moments of learning. We encourage the children to engage with our floor book, offering space for them to reflect and provide possible lines of development. There was an emphasis placed on offering children the tools to express how they are feeling and identifying emotional states, having access and interacting with local community services, having freedom to choose their own play activities without adult interruption, and having plenty of areas to sit and relax. The audit tool brought attention to multi-cultural festivals, and this is an area we would like to develop and hopefully be able to attend such festivals in the coming year(s) – COVID depending!
Environmental
We knew straight away that our setting would be ideal when looking for the possibilities of environmental education. The children have continuous free access between indoor and outdoor play areas, especially during the warmer months, and there are plenty of resources to support gross motor skills, health, and respect for the natural environment. We had so much fun this year watching our tadpoles grow, releasing our butterflies, creating bird feeders and the never-ending worm/slug count. We believe the children have developed a respect and love for looking after and observing nature. One of our biggest achievements this year was growing our very own pumpkin – albeit green! We can’t wait until our polycrub is finished and we can continue planting and growing in our garden.
Economics
Reflecting upon economics and how we incorporate it into the nursery was perhaps the most eye-opening. It became apparent that it is never too young to encourage and teach children about recycling, locally grown foods, and being mindful of our resources. The pre-schooler’s created a ‘book hospital’ to put books and toys that were broken and could potentially be fixed, we had group discussions on recycling and read lots of useful books and continued to experience seed-to-plate eating. Imaginative and role play is a large part of our children’s play, and we continue to ensure that there were opportunities to play with tills, money, and have supported them in creating their own menus and receipts. We even set up a stall to sell tie-dye clothes, encouraging the children to take on the role of shop keepers. Most recently, we sold our propagated strawberry plants to our parents/carers.
It has been a fantastic opportunity to reflect and enhance our setting. We cannot thank our parents enough for getting on board and supporting their children’s learning throughout this time. We were awarded the Bronze Award in October and were thrilled with the feedback we received:
“We are particularly impressed by the setting’s engagement in analysing their practice during the baseline audit to promote deeper learning experiences across the three pillars of sustainable citizenship”
“The sustainable activity floor-books promote reflection and discussion – a superb resource, and the setting’s commitment to healthy eating is exemplary”
We cannot wait to make a start on our Silver Award in the new year and have also since joined online sessions with Lynette Brock to deepen our understanding of SchemaPlay. Fingers crossed for another beautiful summer!
