Transcript: Arnprior Nursery - Children leading learning
Lorna Willows: We absolutely believe in listening to children, and really truly and honestly listening to children. A really good example of this would be, at Arnprior Nursery, there was one very busy week here in the nursery, where I had been very busy in the office. Ben, who was a child who liked to come and talk to me in the office, kept coming in: 'Lorna, Lorna, I've got something to tell you. I've got a great idea.' Over the course of three or four days, I got the feeling I really hadn't been listening to Ben. He kept chapping on the door. I was either on the phone or doing my emails; really very busy being a Head. One day Ben came in, I think it was around about the Thursday, and he just said, 'Lorna, I really need you to listen.' So I said, 'Right, okay'. So I put the phone away, stopped the computer and got on the floor and sat down with Ben. He said to me, 'Lorna, I've got a great idea. I think we need to go on a camping trip'. At first, I was a bit, 'Oh, right, okay, we want to go on a camping trip'. I thought, no, I really have to listen to Ben. This is actually a really good idea and a really good provocation for learning.
So I talked to Ben about it and said, 'You think that's a good idea, but other people might not think that's a very good idea. So what we need to do, first of all, is to ask people, and how do you think we should do that?' Ben came up with the idea that we should write a letter. We should explain everything in the letter and let people make their own decision if they thought it was a good idea to have a camping trip. Lo and behold, after the letters had been written and Ben had handed them out at the door to everybody, there was a real buzz in the nursery, a real sense of community, a real sense of coming together. It was all around Ben's camping trip. There was lots of parents discussing: oh my goodness, this is great. We'll bring this. We'll bring that. We'll do this. We'll do that.
Ben then set about, with his friends, planning the camping trip, so there was actually a whole year of learning about how to put up a tent, the problems we might encounter, how do we build a campfire? We actually wrote a letter to an expert who was able to help us. We then set about looking at what would be the risks around fire and also what would be the risks in camping in a field?
So the children set off one day with one of our parents who actually has a farm in Arnprior and they kindly allowed us to use one of their fields very nearby. So we decided we better go and check out what the risks were. So the children set off with a list of all the things they thought were really good about the trip - sorry, all the things they thought would be good about the field and all the things that they thought might be quite high risk. So we arrived at the field, where we found poo. We had a lot of sheep's poo. There was an electric fence. The grass was quite long. So we had a good discussion around that and what would need to happen in the field to make it safe for everybody to come.
So, then what happened was that eventually we had our camping trip in the summer and it was an absolute tremendous event. I can't begin to describe the sense of community, the sense of belonging. Everybody came together. We had great fun. The children were all climbing trees. Parents were helping each other to put up tents. We had our campfire. The children had wanted their campfire singing. We had a bedtime story. So there was lots of learning going on but also lots of fun and a real sense of family and, again, staff and children coming together.