Travel fellowship announced

Two Tauranga-based educators have been jointly awarded the Margaret M Blackwell Travel fellowship to visit forest kindergartens in Europe.

Kathryn Hart and Annette Sheehy are both from the Tauranga Free Kindergarten Association and work with teachers in kindergartens as well as home-based carers.

They will join a study tour of forest kindergartens in Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany, and also plan to look at kindergartens in the UK that have been inspired by the forest kindergarten movement.

They will be looking at the natural learning experiences that the children within these services are immersed in on a daily basis.

In a forest or wood kindergarten, children spend almost all their time outdoors, learning from the natural environment and playing with toys made from objects found in nature rather than commercial toys. They go indoors only if it is extremely cold.

“We hope it will open our eyes to a whole different way of doing things,” Annette Sheehy says.

They are particularly interested in how the ideas could be applied to the home-based care environment, which are less bound by regulations than other ECE settings.

The fellowship is funded by a trust set up in honour of Margaret May Blackwell, who was closely involved in education and welfare of young children both in NZ and overseas. It is administered on behalf of the trust by the NZ Council for Educational Research (NZCER).

The fellowship is awarded annually to enable suitable persons working in the ECE sector to study overseas to gain further experience and subsequently to disseminate that information for the benefit of ECE in NZ.