I wonder how often we miss learning opportunites because we see them as problems to be avoided?  Look at this patch of lawn which has had a pallet on it for the past couple of weeks.  Wouldn’t it be a wonderful chance to encourage children to wonder why the grass had changed colour?

To speculate why the buttercup plants seem much bigger in the part of the lawn that has been covered (on the left) with that which has been uncovered.  To wonder why there are more worm casts in the covered area.  Time spent chatting to a child would provide so many assessment opportunities about their understanding about plants and the needs of living things.  However, (and I totally hold my hands up to this) so often we would say “Move that from the grass” because, as adults, we already know what will happen and forget to look at our world in the way that a child does.  On those rare occasions when we do see the world through child’s eyes there is so much more to learn; however old we are.