By Anna Christiansen, Teacher
The abundant flowers in the Bing yards became a focal point of the curriculum in West PM this year. The flowers not only beautify the school, they also serve as materials for children to use to extend play.
Bing Nursery School founder Edith Dowley wanted the outdoors to be more important to the children than the indoors, which led her to provide the school with appealing grounds “so they would be lured out there.” In addition to designing rolling hills in the half-acre play yards in each nursery classroom and planting trees, she also wanted the yards to host odd-looking bushes and trees, such as willows, and odd-shaped flowers, like agapanthus—which look like umbrellas—so children would ask about them. Over 50 years later, Dowley’s vision remains central to the child’s experience.
A gardening enthusiast myself, I have planted flowers and vegetables at Bing with the children to enhance the environment and have incorporated flowers into the curriculum.
As we included more than 25 flower species in our activities, we saw how experiences with flowers facilitated development of skills and sensitivity toward nature and inspired play narratives over the course of a year. As Dowley elucidated, “We asked them [architects] to plant the trees and the shrubbery so the children had a gratification of the sense of smell and sight—that the seasons’ changes were marked.”
Through the act of picking flowers, children practiced regulating their behaviors—for example, they learned to refrain from picking so many that they would harm the plant or aesthetic or leave too few for others to pick. They also learned to be mindful of other parts of the plant as they picked flowers and to use a special pinching technique that reduces harm to the plant. They cared for flowers by watering them, understanding it takes work and care if we want them to keep growing.
Following are some examples of flowers in the curriculum:
• At the art cart in the play yard, a 4-year-old boy eagerly chose pipe cleaners and selected a flower from a bouquet on the table. He twisted them together and created a long structure with the flower at the tip. The final product was “a bee trap,” and he went on a mission outdoors to spot a bee and see if the invention would work.
• When the camelias were blooming in January and February, the children used their petals with clay to create new designs. A stem with leaves and a flower became a sailboat’s mast. The petals took on new life as wings on a bumble bee. Symmetry was explored as a child designed a heart brick with two petals.
• In April, a child picked a flower, and when a teacher asked a question using the word flower, the child, who is an English-language learner, responded with, “No, it’s a dandelion!”
• Children learned nomenclature and expanded their vocabulary and sphere of knowledge. A child painted “a golden poppy” and stated, “This one glows at night and opens up at night and closes in the daytime,”—an imaginative spin on California poppies. The trajectory for many children went from drawing their general idea of a flower to drawing a specific flower or being able to understand and use the new knowledge about flowers in play.
• Significantly, a 5-year-old girl who was enamored of flowers decided to write a story about the important relationship flowers have with the sun. The child drew and cut out flowers, adhering them to a craft stick to make puppets. She then reenacted the story with her puppets during story time.
Flowers are omnipresent in the curriculum. In her vision, Dowley stated that there should be lots of flowers, and that children “can gather them, and we always try to see that we have enough that they can do this. And this is the kind of world that we hope they live in.” Indeed, a world full of colors, smells, textures and variety in the garden is one we are fortunate to have at Bing.