Looking for starfish, Mitchell Cove, Tremont, Maine

We were fortunate to spend several weeks with our three grandchildren both in Vermont and in Maine during the months of August and September. On many occasions, I became intrigued with what happened when they engaged with the natural materials of the world, everywhere…in the woods, on riverbanks, in lakes, on the cobble beaches of Maine, in the vegetable garden! So much to see, so much to smell, handle, arrange, feel, discover, invent!

I was reminded of a book that I love, Beautiful Stuff from Nature, edited by Cathy Wiseman Topal and Lella Gandini that came out a few years ago. Building on their first book, Beautiful Stuff, Cathy and Lella sought out schools, both public and independent, where teachers had stories and examples to share about organizing learning experiences around collecting, playing with, composing and studying materials from the natural world. The book is organized around the themes of Getting Started; Cultivating a Naturalist’s Sensibilities; Your Unique Place; Outdoor Explorations; and Bringing Nature Inside. It is illustrated with beautiful photographs and is written by teachers of toddlers through elementary ages in both the United States and Canada. It is a thoughtful, helpful resource that is well worth having in any school or parent library.

Stones collected by children on the beach

What is so clear to the authors and editors of this book, and to anyone who is lucky enough to be with a child outside, is that the out of doors quickly becomes a natural playground. When our granddaughter, Delilah, age 6, first arrived in Vermont, we all headed straight to swim in a nearby, cold, clear, flowing river. Frist thing, she climbed out to a big boulder in the middle of the river and began to organize stones in pools on and around the boulder. She had stories to tell about what she was doing. She was making an exhibit, she said, of different colors of stones in the different sized rock pools and she wanted us to come see!

When two-and-a-half-year-old Jack was with us in Maine, one of his favorite things to do was to go out to the cobble beach and find stones to pitch into what his grandfather named the “muck and mire,” the beginning of a marshland behind a natural gravel wall. He liked to imitate the sounds of the different size stones landing in the mud…a tiny sound, a medium slurp, and a big galump!

Building a flag pole with found materials

Nine-year-old, Asher’s biggest adventure in Maine was climbing one of the steepest trails in Acadia National Park with his big uncle Chris. It was a spur of the moment decision on Asher’s last day and a brave venture that he was so proud to have accomplished!

And we all made collections…of stones, of snail shells, of crab shells, of sticks, and pinecones. And we arranged them in various combinations and mandalas. Delilah took a rock collection home with her to Boston. And Jack took a snail shell shaker back home with him to New Jersey.

Cathy Topal and Lella Gandini write:

Exploring, experimenting, researching, designing, and creating with natural materials can act as an awakening for children-but perhaps even more so for teachers, [and parents and grandparents]. To notice and pick up a seedpod, twig, stone, piece of bark, draws us in and invites us to linger and to wonder. We start to see-with refined vision-what has been around us all along. Holding a natural form is to look at functional design, transformation, time, weather, and the forces of nature.

Tide pooling, Wonderland, Acadia National Park

The first project with the youngest children, (age three), that I observed in Reggio Emilia at the Diana School was all about leaves…such a collection of beautiful leaves of all colors from different trees..chestnuts, oaks, plane trees along with seeds and pods. The children collected all this outside with their teachers in the public garden right outside their school. Then, they organized the collections so that they became like a grand palette to choose from. The teachers asked the children something like this… “What if you were like the wind and could make an arrangement of leaves on the ground, what would you do?” And in small groups, on sheets of earth colored, recycled paper, they made their compositions, with one teacher as an assistant.

I was lucky enough to attend the study tour in 2011 in Ligonchio, Italy, organized and led by Reggio Children, Dialogue with the Atelier and the Natural World. We spent the week playing outside in the fields, mountains, forests, and streams with materials organized for us, with prompts and Reggio educators there to guide us. With Carlina Rinaldi, Vea Vecchi, Marina Mori, and Giovanni Piazza as teachers and guides, in a spectacular mountain setting, we were such a fortunate group. I will always hold that week close as one of my greatest inspirations.

Before I lived, worked, and learned in Reggio Emilia, I never thought of natural materials as a category, a medium, to use to explore and compose meaning and beauty. To understand natural materials as a powerful, evocative medium was one of the unexpected and lasting lessons that I learned there.

From Collection of Images from Reggio Emilia, 2009

Now, I can’t help picking up stones and shells, leaves and cones. I line them up, put them in circles, keep them close by my bedside as reminders… of the constancy and beauty in the natural world, of the cycles of life and death, and of the calm and the wild of the world that we inhabit, and that we are inseparably linked to.

On my 21st birthday, my mother gave me a smooth, white stone that she had found on the beach. She wrote, “Always return to the stone to steady yourself, to know your place, to connect to the beauty of the world.”

When we take children out of doors to look for treasures, when we stand with them at the window and marvel at wind and thunder and rain, when we hike mountains, when we sit still together and watch the sun set or the stars in the night sky, we are giving children a touch stone, a solace, a strong sense of place, and a home.