Nature Club

It’s January in Northern England. Wintertime in a British primary school and nobody wants to go outside... except those children. The ones that don't notice it's 4 degrees and look confused when you ask them to put a coat on.

I thought, I used to be like that as a child. When do we lose that?

I heard an interesting idea recently. That children are always experimenting, pushing themselves to their limit and discovering what that limit looks or feels like. When was the last time you tried to see how fast you could run, just for fun? How high you can climb? Just drawing your family because you want to.

Most adults appear to lose this... maybe because we find those limits as children and don't bother to continue testing as we age, presuming those found limits are unchanging.

So, I thought for those children that like to get messy and for myself, wanting to stretch my teaching, why not have an afterschool club where we can push those limits of the traditional education in our school and get muddy, look for worms, identify plants and find out the types of places spiders live?