Wildflower Blog Post - Expanding Awareness

The beautiful, unseasonably hot weather has brought smiles to the faces of everyone around and has made venturing outside a pleasure! The students at wildflower have been connecting to the world around them by expanding their awareness. 

Students are receiving outdoor lessons that help them to connect with nature and appreciate the beauty of the world around them. On our walk to Gyro park, students were tasked with “finding faces in unexpected places” and they did not disappoint. There were some parameters - faces are too easy to spot on vehicles so those were off limits, also faces on anything that one would expect to have a face were also off limits. Students had to really look, and when they did, they found faces all over the place!

We found faces on houses, the sidewalk, the fence, the telephone poles, the trees and many more places. The most fun was seeing students relate to the emotions the faces seem to give off, often copying the facial expressions. 

Once at Gyro, students were asked to consider what was above them? No one could say the same answer and they really hit the mark! Students mentioned everything from the leaves and branches to the moon and the International Space Station! We then went around the circle and answered the question of what is below us as well. Everything from worms to fossils to magma were answers given. We often only think about what is around us so this exercise really helped students understand that the world is so much bigger than what we see. 

Then we talked about mycelium and how the mycelium network allows the trees to communicate with each other and other plants in the area by use of electrical impulses. Students knew their brains also send electrical signals to their bodies allowing them to move or process information. Students were asked to touch the grass; they learned about Earthing or Grounding which has many health benefits. They considered that our own electrical signals can maybe connect with the electrical signals of the mycelial network allowing us to communicate with the trees or the natural world around them as our ancestors have done for millennia. You could see the spark, that world was coming alive and the power of connecting to that world was something many were ready to explore further. 

After that, we talked about the tipi teaching of Stewardship and considered what it meant to be a steward of the earth. Students shared many ways one can protect the world and the natural environment but the one that everyone agreed we could take action on was cleaning up litter. So we donned some gloves and cleaned up the park, the streets and even people’s yards! The students were thrilled with the amount of litter that was picked up and disgusted by the fact there was so much litter in the first place. 

Submitted by Naomi Legg - Aboriginal Academic Success Teacher, Wildflower Nelson