The Inspirations for Activities aim to inspire educators to facilitate activities which can engage children holistically, using the ‘eyes, hands, heart and head’ approach described in the Children in Permaculture manual. Educators can then elaborate on these ideas to develop session plans based on the children’s present interests or ongoing inquiry projects. When implementing these activities, some of them may require additional permaculture knowledge or skills, in which case support may be sought from a local permaculture organisation or CiP practitioner.
Naturally, there are infinite possible activities, so these lists are not intended to be exhaustive or limiting. Rather, it offers seeds to inspire educators around the world with ideas about how to engage children in permaculture and to help them work with the nature of the child. Typically, in the process of working with children, many more ideas and inspirations will appear both from the children and the educator and these too can be nurtured into full session plans. Some of the ideas brought together and shared have been inspirations from children themselves. So far this database only lists ‘Inspirations for Activities’ for five of the topics in the CiP curriculum. These topics are the ones identified in the Survey of Resources for Engaging Children in Permaculture (by Alderslowe, Amus, Cifarelli, Deshaies, Dumitrescu, Kastelic, Petru and Velehradska, 2016) as the areas with the fewest existing resources, and thus where permaculture can offer the most added value. These topics are ‘1. Permaculture Ethics and Principles’, ‘2. Connections’, ‘3. Soil and Stone’, ‘8. Designing’, and ‘9. Growing Food’. In due course, it is hoped that inspirations for activities for the other topics will be added to this database.
