The lesson plans are designed to help develop attention skills (listening and focusing); enhance auditory, tactile and visual awareness, augment empathy for others, and finally, provide opportunities to further the child’s development of declarative memory skills such as: direct, episodic and semantic memory specifically.
All of the above reinforces the building of an individual sense of self and awareness of natural place so that the child becomes aware of their individual role in the natural environment. The ultimate goal is to instill a sense of associations and connections to nature through its patterns, shapes, sounds and forms.
On the first day, the students learned about the various shapes in nature and how they are repeated in various forms spread amongst various living things on the planet; did a nature walk to find rabbits, and returned to tell their stories of what they experienced. The second day, the children played a touch nature exercise, sat and listened to the sounds of nature in the garden, and walked over to the forest nearby to collect a variety of items to produce a nature collage. On the third day, the children created the collage and played with an interactive movement piece which allowed them to move in space and trigger video images of the rabbits, the tree trucks they touched, the flower of the garden and the trees of the forest.
Textura Corpus, Laura Lee Coles and Rob Scharein
Photos: Laura Lee Coles, Wynne Palmer and Rob Scharein
Thank you to all the children in the workshops, all the volunteers and staff of West Point Grey Community Centre