For World Book Day Snakes in the Heather Public Engagement and Education Officer, Owain Masters shares a story about a recent lesson he delivered using the "Lost Words, A Spell Book", as inspiration
“I’ll give you a clue… it rhymes with horse,” I say, gesturing to the prickly green bush with the bright yellow flowers.
“GORSE!” the majority of the class call out in unison.
We were standing outside on a sandy track on Ferndown Common. It was an overcast and slightly chilly day in late February. Thankfully, the dark clouds had not made good on their threat and it had remained dry.
The Deputy Head-teacher had approached me to deliver lessons as part of ‘Arts Week’. Over the course of a couple of days, I was to take 6 classes, a mix of Year 2s, 3s and 4s, or 6 to 9 years olds in non-education vernacular, to visit the heathland behind their school and highlight the wildlife therein.
The sessions went as follows; I started in the classroom, using the smart board and lots of pictures to talk all about what makes a reptile a reptile. Once we had established that they have scales and are cold blooded, and that there were big reptiles like alligators and turtles in warmer countries, we spent some time talking about the reptiles that live in the UK. After that, we learned the names of the 6 native reptile species, what they looked like, where they lived and learned a fun fact/super power about each one!
I then asked them which of the reptiles they had heard of before and they had all heard of at least one of the animals before. Many of them had heard of slow-worms and all of them had heard of the adder. When I asked them why, many hands shot into the air to provide me with my answer. They had been reading The Lost Words, A Spell Book with their teachers.
The Lost Words is a hardback book consisting of poems or ‘spells’ and beautiful artwork about native species. It ‘began as a response to the removal of everyday nature words - among them "acorn", "bluebell", "kingfisher" and "wren" - from a widely used children’s dictionary’ … but ‘then grew to become a much broader protest at the loss of the natural world around us, as well as a celebration of the creatures and plants with which we share our lives’ (text from www.thelostwords.org).
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Posted On: 02/03/2023