Spring Flowers: Take your kids on a spring trip to the botanical garden and be a natural child

Preface

Excerpt from "Song of Nature":
Walking through wind, frost, rain, and snow, I sit and watch the seasons change.
Looking down at Mount Sumeru, observing the grass and weeds, looking up at the starry sky,
opening my five senses, feeling the familiar, becoming fresh,
no longer afraid of the night. A feast of

insects and frogs, marching through the wilderness, dragonflies patrolling the lakeside,
butterflies transforming into fallen leaves, occasionally encountering stink bug eggs, wearing smiling faces...
This secret garden, timeless,
buries nature's deepest connection.

Today, I want to talk about our nature education activities! What exactly are we doing with nature education activities for so long? What do we want to convey?

The two things we focus on most during our activities are: the state of the parents before and after their natural experience, and the state of the children before and after their natural experience. We also focus on the interaction between parents and children during the experience, and whether everyone has learned the experience, methods, and knowledge of nature observation.

A long time ago, I often found that some parents who sent their children to participate in nature experiences were really just "sending their children" to experience nature. The parents themselves were either playing with their phones the whole time or standing far away to watch, as if they instinctively thought, "This is your children's activity, it has nothing to do with me."

Since then, I have emphasized the importance of parent-child companionship before every activity, and this one was no exception. It's not that we lack nature, but rather that we lack attention to nature and guidance for our children.

When reviewing the photos, whenever we see parents accompanying their children and bending over to gaze intently at the flowers and plants, when we see parents carefully recording and taking photos, and when we see children constantly engaging in the process and learning to express, describe, and ask questions, we feel that an activity is rewarding for the participants and worthwhile for the efforts of the nature teachers!

1. Before entering nature

The most unavoidable situation when familiar children are together is that they become too familiar with each other and become too lively and unable to calm down. This directly leads to the fact that it may take them longer to integrate into the nature during an activity.

If this state of excitement continues, it is very likely that you will be immersed in running and playing the entire time and gain little from the experience of nature.

Therefore, helping children calm down and immerse themselves in the environment is the first step in nature education activities. Secondly, raising parents' awareness of accompanying children is crucial. Learning in nature is a unique experience for adults, too. Once
children leave the classroom and are immersed in nature, they relax and find greater freedom to express themselves. They are full of energy and vitality, which is crucial for them to maintain during nature education.

Before embracing nature, hug your friends first!

2. Natural Cognition

Every time we go to the botanical garden, we make new discoveries. Every group has different gains, and every nature instructor has different emphases in guiding the children.

Teacher Dove focused on introducing nature observation methods. We put aside the booklet and walked into nature to carefully observe and touch the flowers, trying to understand the secrets of flowers - whether they have 4, 5 or 6 petals, what color, whether they have fuzz, and what it feels like... We saw old crow petals, blood-activating dan, cat's claw grass, milk vetch, zhugecai, purple-leaf plum, and many other names. Many of them were too complicated to remember, but it didn't matter. It was great to experience the key points and fun of nature observation in one experience. The parents along the way were very cooperative, and the children were very active...

We learned that the "butts" of Corydalis are different, some are pointed and some are blunt (the pointed ones with a hint of pink are Corydalis bulbiliana, and the blunt ones with bluish-purple colors are Corydalis carpels). We saw that the basal leaves of Cat's Claw look like cat's claws, the petals of Crow's Petal have two layers, and the inflorescence of legumes is composed of 6 to 7 small flowers... Including the distribution of our entire botanical garden, parents can refer to the map in the materials we distribute. The botanical garden covers a very large area and has three to four thousand species of plants.

The entire cognitive activity revolves around the "Plant Classification Area". The reasons for choosing this area are: first, people will not be as densely populated as in the tourist area; second, the plant classification area classifies plants into different categories, which is beneficial for systematic cognition. It is a rare place for urban plant science popularization.

Teacher Iris emphasizes practice and documentation. She takes the children to pause, observe, and record each spring carpet of flowers. She guides them into the microcosm of nature, allowing them to appreciate the unique charm of herbs. It's as if they were living in a giant kingdom, leaning over to observe and touch the miniature landscapes that nature has selflessly gifted us from a giant's perspective. Precisely because spring wildflowers are so inconspicuous, most people fail to notice the beautiful scenery beneath their feet, preferring to pause and admire the vibrant, eye-catching blossoms blooming on the branches.

She asked the children to take out plant atlases and compare the pictures with the real objects, guiding them to develop the habit of quickly recording the characteristics of the plants (such as color, shape, number of petals, leaf shape, etc.), deepening the children's impression of the plants they saw, and providing a reference for the children's natural recording methods when they go out to appreciate flowers on their own in the future.

There is no order to encountering plants in nature. People who have recorded nature know that spring flowers bloom and fade so quickly that we don’t have time to see them before many flowers have quietly withered. Our manual is just a guide to tell children that there may be so many beautiful things that you have not noticed, but you will discover them if you pay attention.

Teacher Lu Wei, on the other hand, took her time to appreciate the details of the small flowers she encountered, focusing on a combination of perception and observation. From the tiny flowers of shepherd's purse, commonly known as shepherd's purse, which belongs to the crucifer family, its small white flowers have four petals arranged in a cross. Its pods resemble tiny hearts, and the entire plant sways in the wind. Cardamine, also in the crucifer family, has slightly larger flowers and elongated siliques, making it clearly distinguishable from shepherd's purse. From the tiny white flowers of Chickweed to the fuzzy, ball-shaped, clustered clumps of tiny white flowers, we also encountered the Arabian Speedwell, whose flowers resemble small plates...

Then the children discovered the snakeberry with small yellow flowers. Here, we carefully observed the structure of the flower: calyx, petals, stamens and pistil.

The plant of the snakeberry is prostrate, its stems crawling along the ground until they bump into the nearby Viola yedoensis. Cat's claw has small yellow flowers similar to those of the snakeberry, but the petals are shiny and waxy. Both the engraved-leaf violet and the radix scutellariae have small purple flowers.

Here, the children even picked up some "thorn balls" (the fruit of the sweetgum tree, used as a medicine, also called "lulutong"). Further ahead, there was a large field of elaeagnus, and around to the rose family, red-leafed plum blossoms with pink and white flowers; the calyx of the wood peach had fused at the base into a small tube, and the petals were pressed against each other like tiles; the cherry trees had passed their blooming period, and were now showing tender red leaves. Further down, the ground was covered with white magnolias, their petals soft and thick, and they were in full bloom. Then came the pointed-leafed magnolias and broad-leaved magnolias, with small yellow flowers and green to purple fruits...

3. Encounter with Plants

Our children met spring flowers along the way and felt how many spring elves they met.

There are shepherd's purse and cardamine with small flowers from the Cruciferae family, chickweed and osmanthus from the Caryophyllaceae family, Arabian speedwell with small blue-purple flowers, the "little tulips" blooming in spring, and duchesnea and cat's claw with small yellow flowers.

Corydalis occidentalis, radix scutellariae, and radix scutellariae all bloomed purple in the wild. Along the way, the fruits of sweetgum trees, camphor trees, and the "red beans" of scutellaria serrata... all represented the beginning of new life. Fields of elaeagnus, fallen magnolias, and camellias blanketed the ground. Along the way, children collected petals, using the fallen leaves, fruits, and flowers to create nature stickers.

4. Nature stickers

The children were very attentive and creative in this activity. Arbor Day is only a few days away, and while we can't actually plant a tree in the botanical garden, I hope our activity can plant a seed of understanding nature in the children's hearts.

During this process, parents can understand their children's special ideas and thoughts from their children's creations without interfering with their children. As teachers, we can see whether the children have integrated into the activity and incorporated the experience gained from the activity into their creations.

Every child is an angel. They have their own way of expressing their own world and a tree in their heart. As long as parents are more patient and attentive, you can always hear and feel his/her true inner voice.

Conclusion

Be a natural child

At the end of each activity, some felt they had benefited from learning, the children were happy and engaged, and had learned to observe, while others felt exhausted and bored. For every family that left the botanical garden today, the impact was profoundly different. For us nature guides, the end of an activity marks a new starting point, a fresh beginning.

When we saw some of the learning materials and courseware we painstakingly prepared lying in the trash, we realized: our nature education still has a long way to go. Of course, the goal of nature education isn't to win universal approval, but to help more and more people experience the charm of nature and understand its significance, thereby encouraging more people to actively engage with and cherish the nature around us.
Thinking of our parents' thirst for natural knowledge, even more eager than their children's, and the children's joyful and thoughtful expressions after engaging with nature, we know that persisting in nature education is meaningful and necessary.

Urban dwellers have been deprived of nature for a long time, and we are completely unaware of it as we are surrounded by electronic products every day.