Sudbury project to help young children connect with nature

An art project along Sudbury's Junction Creek will help young students connect with nature and learn creative research practices.

The Tiny Traces along Junction Creek project is a collaboration between the creek's stewardship committee and Early Childhood Creative Collaborations, an organization that works to support and enhance early childhood education in the region.

"We're a group of educators," said Sharon Speir, the group's co-chair. "We came together in part because we wanted to explore further some of the things that are going on in early childhood education."

The project will encourage young children to explore nature and will use art to help spark their imaginations, and encourage them to ask insightful questions.

"So children have beautiful questions that they ask," Speir said. 

"And we like the idea of working with those questions and alongside children. So rather than always giving them the answers to the questions, thinking about what those questions mean and how we might investigate them further."

To help encourage those questions the project has recruited artist Sophie Edwards to create "creativity boxes", which will be filled with art supplies parents and their children can access to engage with the environment.

The creativity boxes will be installed long Junction Creek.

"So getting kids and their families along the creek and the park is going to build a relationship in a different way," Edwards said. "I think that intergenerational learning is really important and we encourage educators to learn alongside the children."

Exploring nature

Edwards said the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the detrimental effect social isolation, and separation from the natural environment, can have on people.

She said the project will be a way for families to get back in contact with nature, and to engage with the world around them.

The project has received funding from the Canada Healthy Communities Initiative to help create those experiences.

On Nov. 20, the project is hosting its first event, with a walk, and related art experiences, starting in Sudbury's Percy Playground, in the Flour Mill area. 

That first event is part of a collaboration with Better Beginnings Better Futures, an organization that provides child-centred activities and community development in the Flour Mill and Donovan neighbourhoods.