Educating early-year children on the environment

Children in the UCL Day Nursery are receiving an early-years education in different aspects of sustainable development, from biodiversity and energy to waste and recycling.

The UCL Day Nursery embeds a ‘Forest School’ principle into its activities and runs a weekly Green Group to give the early-years children a working understanding of their effect on their environment. 

Children at UCL Day Nursery enjoy weekly ‘Forest School’ sessions where they take part in activities including mini-beast hunts, tree climbing, playing ‘leaf detectives’ (identifying the trees and flora), and fat-ball making (for the bird feeders).  

The children also investigate how paper is made, recycling their own paper for Christmas cards. “We reflect on how much paper we use during our day,” explains Emma Rhymer (UCL Day Nursery).

““We concluded that recycling paper is much better than throwing it away, but the children also began to understand that to create recycled paper still takes a lot of energy – and if they could reduce the amount of paper waste we create, it would ultimately save resources and energy.” 

The Nursery also runs planting throughout the year to give the children an understanding of how food and crops are created, and the significance of the oxygen produced by plants. “This year we had a good apple crop,” says Emma. “The children followed the growth from blossom to buds to apples. We then picked them and made apple crumble.” 

The children explore the decomposition times for different materials. They discovered plastic waste  remained unchanged in the time it took for the fruit and vegetable waste to break down.