found some bits of paper and the memories they invoked

So I was doing a bit of tidying up yesterday, I know surprising, and I came across some bits of paper all folded up and scruffy looking. Whats this I says, stopping myself from throwing them to have a look at what they were instead.

In June 2005 I went to a workshop in Thorndon Country Park in Essex with Joseph Cornell, not the american artist who died years ago, no, this one is an american but one I have long respected. This Joseph Cornell wrote a very influential book about and called Sharing Nature with Children that was published in the early 1980's, that book was first shown to me in 1989 by my first boss in the world of countryside management Mike Stagg, another man I have long respected. This was at a time when environmental education was trying to move away from what felt like rigid school based scientific activities to a looser more open style, that style accepted that everyone is different and might not want to be involved in outdoor learning but why not try and get environmental messages across in different ways and perhaps have fun in the process. This was the approach we used with children a lot often mixed with other more scientific but still loose activities.

There were two newish approaches doing the rounds then, there are undoubtedly more now, Joseph Cornell's and another which I won't name but which to me appeared to be too restrictive and prescriptive. Cornell's approach appealed to me and still does, its more flexible, doesn't mean I didn't use bits of the other approach, the Cornell approach just feels better.

Anyway there I was with these bits of paper from the workshop, it was a practical day spent outdoors on a warm spring day in the woodlands that make up Thorndon with a small group of people all appreciating that it isn't often that Joseph Cornell comes to this country to talk and show his ideas off. It was a magical day a day of taking part in activities designed to get children involved in the natural world and seeing them through their eyes by taking part in them. I read my notes and my activity sheets and the words I had written in pencil on them in 2005. Did I really write those words, I must have been completely immersed in the day and the activities and smiled to myself cos I know I was. It was a day that gave me hope, filled me again with enthusiasm for working with children and trying but not too hard to enthrall them with the magic that is the natural world.

I looked at the bits of paper, could I throw them away, no couldn't do it, not yet anyway too many memories of good times past and good people.