This Term Three, we decided to enter the Hanging Basket Competition at Cobb+Co Museum as a way to celebrate the Carnival of Flowers and engage with our wider community.
At Bush Kindy, the children were so excited and had so many ideas. I wanted to make sure the project was truly child-led and that their ideas were given the time and space to grow. So, we started with a mind map and spent some time thinking carefully about what we might create, rather than rushing into it.
We chose natives to support bees and butterflies
We spend a lot of time outdoors and on Country, and the theme for the competition was “Spring Adventures”. We certainly have many of those adventures when we gather at Bush Kindy, where we celebrate and notice the changing seasons together.
It felt like the perfect opportunity to connect this project with what we were already seeing around us as we moved from winter into spring and those beautiful in-between seasons. Some of the children’s ideas have now come to life through this project.
Children from bubs to five years have all contributed their ideas. They have painted, created, collected and worked with paperbark, and each part of the basket has grown from their experiences at Bush Kindy.
One of the most special parts of our space is our three magpies. They are our friends. They come and sit with us and sing, and sometimes they will even come and sit on our yarn mat while we are gathering.
The children have come to know these three maggies over the years. Some of our children have been coming since they were babies, so these magpies have always been a part of their Bush Kindy experience.
We had always known that we wanted animals to be part of our hanging basket. At first, we thought about the bandicoot, because there are so many bandicoot holes around our Bush Kindy space. We have never actually seen a bandicoot while gathering, but their presence is very evident.
Creating our own nest!
We started seeing our magpie friends collecting sticks, and we very quickly knew what they were doing. They were preparing for babies in spring!
We watched them very carefully over time and decided to create our very own magpie with a paper mache and painted leaves.
We have been talking a lot about hollows and nests, and how not all birds make or use nests in the same way. Some birds lay their eggs in hollows. This led us to start looking at hollows throughout our bush space as well. Seeing a tree come down brought some upset for the children, and it opened up more conversations about hollows, trees and the homes they provide for our wildlife.
Getting Maggie’s approval
We then voted on which animal we would like to peek out of a hollow in our basket. Some children wanted lorikeets, and some wanted a galah. We eventually settled on native bees after we had some of them landing on our shoulders, quite literally, while we were talking about them! So the children decided that they wanted native bees to be the little creatures peeking out from the hollow in our basket (made from painted black gum nuts)
We have also used native flowers, flowers the children have planted themselves. We wanted to invite native flowers into our basket to support the native bees and butterflies.
When we celebrate the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers, you often see many beautiful flowers, and they are beautiful in their own right. But we wanted to give a little more honour to the native flowers that can often be forgotten, growing quietly out on Country at this time of year.
The native jasmine, native daisies, yellow buttons and of course, the wattles have all been part of what we have been noticing and talking about as we explore and the changing seasons.
This has been such a beautiful experience for us at Bush Kindy.
We now look forward to seeing our hanging basket hanging with other beautiful creations that other spaces have made at Cobb+Co Museum and sharing it with the wider community.
We are so proud of our little ones and the way they have had such a strong lead in this project. I think that is a reward in itself: seeing their ideas come to fruition, watching them work on something together, and seeing their connection to Country, each other and our community woven into something they have created together.
