Ecopedagogies on Campus

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As part of our Oddkin project, the children had the opportunity to become paper makers, learning how old paper can be turned into something completely new.

We started by collecting old paper from around school. The children loved searching for anything they thought could be recycled and, along the way, they also found a few extra treasures! There were pebbles, flower petals and even a forgotten pot of glitter, which of course had to be saved for our paper.

Back in class, everyone helped tear the paper into tiny pieces before soaking it overnight. The next day, it was time for the exciting part, turning it into paper pulp or ‘mush’. Things didn’t quite go to plan when our blender gave up halfway through! After a very quick change of plan (and a replacement blender!), we finally had our mush ready. Although it wasn’t what we expected, it ended up being one of those moments that the children are still talking about!

The children also helped tear up old bedsheets, which we used during the paper-making process. They were so careful when spreading the pulp onto the paper frames, making sure it was really flat, really smooth and really straight. They took so much pride in getting it just right and were brilliant at helping each other.

We were lucky enough to have some beautiful sunny weather, so we were able to make and dry our paper outside. Some children chose to add flower petals while others couldn’t resist sprinkling on a little glitter to make their paper even more special and we still to this day don’t know what gave our paper its vibrant purple shade!

The best part was seeing the children’s faces when the paper had dried. They couldn’t believe they had actually made their own paper! They were so excited that they immediately wanted to write on it, so we made sure everyone had a piece to keep, a piece to write on and one for our Oddkin display.

Throughout the activity, the children were introduced to lots of new vocabulary, including pulp, recycle, blend, soak, texture and flatten, using these words naturally as they worked. It was such a lovely hands-on experience and a fantastic way to show the children how something that might normally be thrown away can be transformed into something useful.

We may have sacrificed our new blender in the process, but it was definitely worth it! It was a memorable experience that the children are still talking about, and one we would love to do again.

The aim of the Minibeasts of Barnet project was to help the children appreciate that all creatures are equal and that people are not superior to minibeasts. We all need each other to survive in this world. As well as all the practical aspects, there were some amazing books that supported this learning.

We started with the book ‘Making Oddkin’ that the University produced with the first cohort of children undertaking the project. This gave the children fresh and creative ideas for looking at minibeasts in different ways.

Some of the books we read were well known books from the topic of minibeasts including ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle and ‘What The Ladybird Heard’ by Julia Donaldson. However it was the lesser known ones that really captured the children’s imagination and led them deeper into the project. One of their favourite was ‘Do Not Lick This Book’ by Idan Ben-Barak. This book followed the adventures of Min the microbe as she visited places such as your teeth and your T-shirt. The electron micrographs gave children a clear idea of what Min would have seen in each ‘habitat’ by enlarging them thousands of times. The children wanted to grow their own microbes so we left some bread in a plastic bag and yogurt in a pot in the classroom. Soon both had fuzzy white and green spots which eventually grew into large cultures of mould, fascinating everyone who saw them.

Another great book was ‘Wild’ by Emily Hughes. This is the story of a little girl who grew up in a forest and just couldn’t be tamed. Through the pictures and class discussions, the children imagined what it would be like to live in the wild and not be able to talk, play and eat as they do but as the animals that live in the forest would.

One of the popular activities in the project was to make paper from natural materials the children collected in school playground. Two lesser known Julia Donaldson books ‘Paper Chase’ and ‘The Oak Tree’ told stories about how paper is made from trees. Both helped the children appreciate that the natural materials they found were vital for making this important product.

Thank you to the people at Middlesex University for this wonderful project.

The Minibeasts of Barnet project was a fantastic experience both for the children and for me as a practitioner! A massive highlight for the children was carrying out their own research- photographing the environment and any minibeasts around the setting on i-pads. Not only was the process of recording a dynamic and engaging activity in itself but it generated such lovely conversations about what they had decided to photograph and why. For us as the teaching staff it was interesting to see how they view the world in a visual form.

As time went on we ALL became more experimental…there were some great suggestions for activities presented on the training day as some helpful starting points but then we made these bees scrunching up local Barnet newspapers, taping it and painting to make our own junk modelling hive. It was great to hear the children using scientific terminology referring to the head, thorax and abdomen as they scrunched, attached and decorated.

The project pushed me out of my teaching comfort zone with collective poetry writing with children surprising me with such super little ditties as this one (which would not be out of place in a modern poetry book!):

Spiral something in the water

Left and right wiggle

Makes me think of the beach

Many children particularly enjoyed making collaged fantasy minibeasts, naming them and creating a narrative (such as the one here on the post-it note): “This insect does magic and disappears where it was to go and he lives in the desert and his favourite food is scorpions…his name is Star of the Show”.

We will definitely continue the Oddkin legacy with plans to include an additional area of investigation into the world of bacteria inspired by the Min book, which we ran out of time to cover. We loved receiving the final poster at the end of the project but as some children were asking about a book just like the Making of Oddkin next year we are also going to have a go at making our own book with our new cohort! Thank you to Jayne, Matthew and the Middlesex staff and the BELS team for inspiring us with a fresh approach to environmental education and providing us with some wonderful resources which will enable us to inspire subsequent cohorts…