Background information

Learning goals: The aim of this activity is to provide children with an opportunity to explore nature by developing their auditory and visual awareness skills. Children will begin to develop focusing skills and educators can determine where individuals vary in their knowledge, language and perceptions of colours and sounds.

Content information: This activity has the participants focusing on the everyday sounds and colours in nature. By encouraging children to stop, be absolutely silent and focus on just two senses one at a time, children build their vocabulary and their awareness that there are many ways to connect with nature.

Concepts and definitions:

Nature - the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape and other features and products of the Earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.
Colour - the property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light.
Sound - vibrations that travel through the air or another medium which can be heard when they reach a person or animal's ear.

New words for children to learn:

Nature - the natural physical world including plants, animals and landscapes.
Natural - things which are made in nature.
Non-natural - things which are made by people (e.g. buildings, cars, roads, people’s clothing).

Activity: Sounds and Colours

What to do:

Preparation: Select an outdoor space in which to conduct this activity. Find the most “natural” area you can, a place that is safe for the children to be in. If possible, find a place where children can sit or lie down on the ground.

Sounds Activity:

Give the children the following directions:

Hold both fists up in the air.
Close your eyes.
Every time you hear a new, different sound, lift one of your fingers. If you hear one type of bird, many times, that’s just one sound; but if you hear two different birds, or really different sounds that might come from the same bird, that’s two sounds.

Observe the children. When most of the children have noted more than 5 sounds, have them open their eyes and have a discussion. Ask children:

How many sounds did you hear?
Can you imitate the sound?
Who else heard that sound?
Which sounds were made by nature?
Which sounds were non-natural?

If you’ve heard many birds, challenge to the group to close their eyes again and listen for a count of 10 without hearing a bird sound.

Colours Activity:

This activity works well as a second activity because the children are usually calmer than when they’ve first come outside.

Ask children to stay where they are sitting and to keep being absolutely silent. They should now focus on the colours they can see, counting how many different colours they can see. They need to be colours around you but not on you, and not on another person. Give children up to one minute to do this activity.

To recap, go through the colours and see who saw a particular colour and whether they can point it out.

Ask the children: Who saw something green/red/blue/yellow etc? What about browns, greys, blacks and whites?

Have discussions about how two things may have the same colour name, but be quite different. This might be the first time children have considered “shades” of colours.

Provocations:

Sounds:

I wonder how many sounds we would hear if we sat here for an hour.
I wonder what sounds we would hear if we came here in the early morning.
I wonder what sounds we would hear if we came here in late at night.
I wonder how animals make sounds.
I wonder how trees and plants make sounds. What is it that is making the sound?

Colours:

I wonder how many different colour names there are.
I wonder if we all see the same colours.
I wonder if the colours we see now look different at sunrise or sunset.
I wonder why nature has so many of a few colours, like greens and browns, and not so many bright ones, like purples or reds.
I wonder why different plants and animals have different colours.

Nature:

I wonder how things grow.
I wonder how things get their colours.
I wonder how things make sounds.
I wonder why some colours in nature change.
I wonder why animals make the sounds they make.

Possible lines of development:

Evaluation

Complete an analysis of learning, listing evidence about:

Belonging	Find something of interest
Communication	Express an idea or feeling
Exploration	Engage with challenges and persist when difficulties arise
Well being	Being involved

Embedding into daily practice

Have quiet times outdoors and indoors and do these activities during different times of the year.
Have a “colour table” where children bring in natural objects they’ve found on the ground. Group similar colours together.
Have children make paintings of the objects on the colour table. What do they need to do with their paints to get the colours right?

Sharing:

Share the ways your children connect with nature during Enviroweek through their artwork, in photos and by writing about it in a parent newsletter.

Enviroweek Wild Child

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