Nature

The Land is where our roots are. The children must be taught to feel and live in harmony with the earth.

Maria Montessori

Montessori advocated “bringing the inside out and the outside in”. Children have an innate interest in Nature and all the wonders that it provides and we encourage children to explore and be creative within this environment.

Outdoors

Outdoors is a valued part of our classroom and our curriculum and we will use it for a wide variety of activities. This could be observing nature on a mindfulness walk, going on a scavenger hunt, art in the park, learning about plants, trees and flowers and of course lots of play and exercise!

We use our outdoors ‘classrooms’ and trips to extend the learning we do in the classroom. Extending mathematics through counting leaves or measuring sticks; expanding language through naming trees, animals and weather; or practicing skills that relate to our knowledge and understanding of our local environment such as following a familiar route and practicing our left and right.

We believe that learning can be practiced in any environment, whether at home, at nursery or outdoors.

We encourage the children to be outside in all weathers, there is no bad weather there is just bad clothing is our motto.

Indoors

At Paint Pots we like to bring the outdoors indoors. Nature tables display a wide range of natural seasonal treasures found by our children, families and staff.

The children are encouraged to grow seeds or plants of their own and care for them. Sometimes our cress or salad seeds grow into our lunch. Linking nature to what we eat as a learning experience.

Our classroom plants create a natural green environment and the children help arrange our classroom flowers.

Each year we usually have caterpillars growing into butterflies and frogspawn to further explore life cycles.

We favour natural materials throughout. Our classrooms are designed to represent a calm, peaceful and natural environment.