Every year the change in seasons from Summer to Autumn provides the most wonderful opportunities for children to explore, inquire, play and learn using our natural environment. The educators in the toddler room have enjoyed using the transitional period of welcoming new children into the room over the course of September and August to provide a variety of materials and experiences that allow us to really observe and get to know their individual interests and abilities. As the season has started to shift, so has the openness and confidence of the new toddlers who are getting comfortable enough to show off the things that make them unique.
While raking the fallen pine needles out of the sandbox on the playground one afternoon, I was barraged by questions from the children watching me. "What is that?" It's a rake! "What are you doing?" I'm cleaning up the sandbox. "What are those?" They're pine needles that fell off the tree. "Why?" Because it's Fall, and it's called Fall because when the weather gets cold, the leaves fall to the ground.
Fallen leaves are a favourite natural material for this age group to use creatively and sensorily, but this unexpected Q&A gave me the idea to use the pine needles, too. Fortunately they were soft rather than prickly; the perfect filling for a nature sensory bin. I set up the bin on the ground on top of a picnic blanket, filled it with pine needles and pine cones, and added some bowls and scissor-handled scooping tools to it, then stood back and watched what the toddlers would do. It provided an engaging way for them to practise fine motor skills related to grasping and using scissors (which provides a foundation for writing skills down the line) as they used the tools to scoop and move the pine needles in and out of the bowls. Some children chose to interact by moving the needles around in order to pick out and gather the cones, then line them up on the picnic blanket, allowing me to help them practise one-to-one correspondence by putting a finger on each pine cone as we counted them together.
Using the natural materials available right on our playground made for a wonderful child-guided experience that showcased the toddlers' developing skills and eagerness to keep learning!
