Early Years Learning
Look, Touch, Listen, Smell, Discover!  

The Urrbrae Wetland is a safe and secure environment which offers a range of learning experiences that encourage children to explore the natural environment and understand how to safely and ethically interact and study the living and non-living components of nature.

The Wetland Manager will work with the key teacher to formulate and adapt a positive experience, which meets individual desired outcomes and provide a context for learning through which children make connections between prior experiences and new learnings.
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These experiences all encourage the children to look, touch, listen, smell, explore and make discoveries and connections to develop a sense of wonder about nature whilst encouraging appreciation for the environment, care and respect for all the living and non-living components.  
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​“Children who respect the environment feel an emotional attachment to the natural world, and deeply understand the link between themselves and nature, will become environmentally literate citizens.”
(Early Childhood Environmental Education Programs: guidelines for Excellence" written and published by, The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) in 2010)

Wetland Walk

​Focus: How The Wetland Works
Time: approx 30 minutes

The children are taken on a guided walk around the wetland. They visit the inlet pipes to see where and how the water enters the wetland, discovering the kinds of pollution that come in through the storm water pipes and the structures that help to remove the pollution from the water (trash racks, reed beds).

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 Scavenger Hunt

Focus: Living and Non-living Components of the Environment
Time: approx 30 minutes

The children are provided with a list of things they need to find around the Urrbrae Wetland. For each of the items ethical conversations are encouraged to allow the children to determine whether they:

• Look, touch, smell and record the item (take a photo, draw a picture) and then leave it in nature.
• Look, touch, smell and collect the item to take back to the Wetland Learning Centre to study further, before returning it back to nature.
• Look, touch, smell and collect the item to take back to their own classrooms.

Wetland Safari

Focus: Things living above and below the water.
Time: approx 30 minutes for each

Children explore and investigate the wetland using a variety of observation tools including magnifiers and binoculars, microsopes and simple identification charts. They aim to identify as many different living things as they can, ticking them off as they go. This includes birds, aquatic macro invertebrates, plants and animals. Throughout the activity questions are posed to the children to encourage them to think about how these creatures may rely on one another.
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Water Testing

Focus: How Clean is the Water?
Time: approx 30 minutes

​The children collect a sample of water from the Wetland, then preform a simple turbidity test to determine how much particulate matter is in the water (dirt) and compare this to drinking water. The children are then able to observe and articulate why it is not safe to drink the wetland water, and what other ways we could use the water instead.