Involve Me

Weather and Climate

Key idea 1: “Weather” describes daily experience, while “climate” describes weather patterns over many years, e.g. Identifying different local seasonal weather conditions, and also the different climates of countries around the world (UC1.1).
Key idea 2: Everyone needs sustainable living spaces, e.g. Learning about clever indigenous housing designs from around the world (UC6.4).

Title:  A Place Called Home: Look Inside Houses Around the World
Author: Kate Baker
Illustrator: Rebecca Green
Publisher: Lonely Planet Kids
Publication Date: 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78868-934-2

This book introduces houses from all over the world, and helps us understand how people live in different places.

Emergent learning:

We cannot teach children the science of Climate Change and Global Warming in the earliest years but if they are to understand it later, they first need to know what CLIMATE is. At first, children learn about WEATHER, and then they learn that Climate means something different to Weather. We can help children learn about weather through daily conversation about the rain, wind and temperature.

It’s only when children have differentiated between different weather conditions, we can talk about weather as a subject. Likewise, when we are ready to talk about “Climate” with children, we need to first give the child a lot of examples of different climates. When we introduce children to the subject of Climates, we can do this by talking about the way people live in different countries, because the local climate effects what they eat, how they dress, and how they make our homes. We all need nutrition, clothes, and houses and we can show children how clever people around the world create these things in different climate conditions.

Activity recommendation:

We can incorporate climate awareness in their play with small world animals – in many Montessori schools, children are given large continental floor maps to play with – they place the animals on the continents they live in – we can do that with picture cards showing food, clothing and houses as well.

Other Book Recommendations:

Learning from our Grandparents

After John and Njeri’s visit we dried the corn that they brought us so that we could plant it in our vegetable garden. We then invited some grandparents into the setting to talk about growing food and the changes between now and when they were children. We wanted to know:
• Did they have a garden when they were little?
• What did he grow in his garden?
• What did they like to eat?
• Did they buy their food in the supermarket (Tesco!)?

Oliver’s granddad Alf visited Monday afternoon and looked at the corn that John had brought in. The children told Grandad Alf that we couldn’t eat it anymore because it had gone hard. Grandad Alf showed us how we could pull off the corn and that these were seeds that we could plant to grow more sweetcorn. He had brought some compost and pots from his allotment for us to use to plant the seeds in. He then asked us if we knew what else the seeds would need to grow and Ruby said that they need sunshine and water. Grandad Alf told us that on his allotment he had a water butt to collect the rain water to help his garden grow and the we showed him that we did the same at preschool.

He told us that when he was little there were no big supermarkets and he lived on a farm and grew lots of vegetables to eat. He grew carrots, potatoes , runner beans, cabbage and they also kept chickens. He still grows his vegetables on his allotment now. He still likes to eat vegetables from his allotment now because they keep him healthy.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ethan’s ‘Popsi’ came to help us plant some more of the sweetcorn and we planted it in pots and in the garden. Mrs Scriven was going to take the pots home over the holiday to put in her greenhouse where it is nice and warm and we are going to see which seeds grow the quickest. ‘Popsi’ said that when he was little he grew peas and carrots in his garden and Alex said that he grew peas in his garden too. He also told the children that he didn’t go to big shops to buy his food when he was little. He went to the local greengrocer in the village to buy things like apples. He told the children that he helps Ethan to grow vegetables in his garden at home and Simba the lion went home with them so that he could find out more. Ethan and Popsi showed Simba the rhubarb, onions, peas and runner beans that they are growing in their garden to eat before inviting him in for dinner.

A Visit from Njeri and John

Njeri and John visited the preschool on the 13th May to tell us all about the OMEP World project on Education for Sustainable development and Intergenerational Dialogues. They also showed us the Kenyan video by Wangari Maathai: “I will be a Hummingbird“.

We showed Njeri, John and Simba all the things we were growing in our garden at Lytchett Maltravers.

How to Grow Maize: An inter-generational dialogue

Grandmother Wanjiku told the children about the old iron jembe’s (hoe’s) that were used before they had the mass-produced steel ones, and then she showed them how to dig. She taught the children how plants need water, light and soil if they were to thrive, and she showed them how they could grow maize at home. Mary asked if the tool could hurt them and Wanjiku said that it could if they didn’t handle it very carefully. She showed them a big scar that showed where she had been cut when she was a young girl so the children were very careful with the tools.

The jembe became heavy when it was loaded with mud, and the mud had to be scraped off.

The children were then shown how they could remove seeds from the cobs and how to plant them.

The children asked if they could eat the seeds and they were told that they couldn’t because they were not cooked.
Then the children asked if they could take some seeds home to grow and they were told that they could.

Wanjiku showed the children how to identify and remove the weeds that would grow around their maize.

Widget in Kenya

On arrival in Kenya, Widget visited the preschool ‘shamba’ with the children. Grandmother Wanjiku was visiting the preschool to tell the children about how she had been growing some of her own food since she was their age.

Many families in Kenya continue to supplement their incomes by growing food in their “shamba” (garden or local plot). The most common crops are maize, beans, and kale. It is often the women who grow the food, men have traditionally cleared the land, looked after the live stock and milked the animals.