Place based, Kids and Curiosity

August 28, 2024

For eight years, several times each summer, children from the nearby KidsCo summer camp have been visiting FECO. When we see them march around the corner we rush up to the shed to greet them.

They range from five to 12 years of age. They are delightful. Often the older kids help with watering. Their contributions are evident all around the orchard: a retaining wall, a garden bed, shade cloths, fences, and art.

This week we designed three projects that relate with being “place based”. We borrowed ideas from Networks of Inquiry and Indigenous Education (NOIIE), a voluntary network of inquiry-based schools and school districts in British Columbia, that integrates Indigenous worldviews and ways of knowing into schools and classrooms and engages land and place-based learning.

The place-based activities we designed for the kids this week included:

• • Awareness of place though use of the senses,
  • Cordage making with the locally abundant stinging nettle, and
  • Exploring a more personal relationship with plants.

Nancy offered an experience of using sound, smell, taste, sight, and feel, to make room to appreciate very specific aspects of their surroundings in nature.

She enjoyed the keen observation skills of the youth and how they each saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt differently. Touching leaves: “some feel soft, others are scratchy”, “the fringe cup feels soft on top but underneath it feels like sandpaper”. When focused on hearing sounds in nature they noted the traffic noise at Freeway Estates Community Orchard and wondered about how the noise might affect birds. One boy made the connection that Orca whales can’t locate food in a ‘noisy’ ocean environment. The kids were intrigued by using their senses of smell and taste together. Most smelled and tasted incense cedar, chives, and mint. They noticed that using both senses together gave them more information than either sense did individually.

Ruth brought stinging nettle, plus strips of its outer bark. The kids explored the benefits of this plant and made cordage from the outer bark.

Over half of the kids had some knowledge of nettle and some had been stung! One child had tasted nettle pesto and another knew that native species of butterfly rely on nettle as the main food for their larvae.

The kids grimaced as they tried to pull apart a piece of braided nettle. One boy expressed, “I’m taking this home to see if my dad can break it.”

It was easy to expose kids to the topic by asking questions but it was challenging to really listen for what aspect of stinging nettle interested them. I found myself interrupting their curiosity to make sure that I had ‘made the point’ of how technologies developed over a long period of time by using resources that are near to one’s home. Quite humbling indeed.

Lee had good success with inquiry-based learning. He was bombarded with questions but simply slowed his response such that the kids started answering each other’s questions.

“It was a spacious morning at the orchard and the kids’ curiosity shined. We guessed how long plants have grown in the area where the orchard is. We also thought about how long people have lived here. We walked together in a loop, stopping to experience the plants that caught our attention.”

Lee encouraged the kids to get to know the plants like potential new friends. Some of the plants got new names, including Sandpaper, Sia, and Beautiful Falling Apart Flower. Other plants had fascinating parts like the tickly leaves of the fully grown asparagus and the big seeds of the nodding onion, which they decided to plant in the ground!

All in all, hosting the KidsCo kids this week was a great practice in ‘getting yourself out of the way’. Inquiry-based interactions, of course, can be a great way to strengthen relationships with anyone or anything!

Ruth