Nature workshops for courses and extracurricular activities (all age groups)
Wild plant events for adults and families
" The joy of looking and understanding is nature's greatest gift "Albert Einstein
I'm Maïté Gillès, a psychologist and psychomotricist by training, and I love organizing nature workshops with children and adults. I love working in nature because it calms me deeply, refocuses me, offers a place for everyone, and is an incredible mine of information. Being in contact with it, learning from nature, enables us to integrate it into ourselves and respect it.
For me, it's important that each child discovers his or her strengths and develops self-confidence in a secure environment.
My aim is to create special moments between children and everything we can discover in nature. First of all reconnect with yourself, with what's going on in your body, with your emotionsTake the time to listen and understand their messages, and then connect to the group. And finally, being in touch with what surrounds us. Take pleasure to observe, touch, create, listen, smell and learn from the forest. I'm keen to stimulate the imaginarythe creativity and the curiosity. I also give the children time to trial and error, so that they can have the satisfaction of doing it themselves.
I offer courses during the school vacations and workshops on pedagogical days at certain schools.
I start from a theme and what we observe in nature, depending on the season, for example, what the children bring along, and their questions. I get the children to squestioning and finding answers during the activity. My activities are punctuated by leisure time with unstructured material, from readings and moments of share. For younger children, reading stimulates the imagination and helps them put into words what they have seen. For older children, I also integrate the scientific dimension to understand what we're observing.
Here's an example of a nature workshop on small animals During the sharing time, we exchange what we know about little beasts and set the scene for the activity. Then I suggest we look for and observe the tiny beasts hidden under the leaves with magnifying glasses and small observation boxes, draw them, find them in a book, then create an imaginary little beast in clay and with other elements found on the spot. Then we invent a story with the little beasts we've created. Finally, we end with a moment of sharing about what everyone has experienced and learned.
Other activity ideas : making a drawing with the sounds we hear, making little boats and floating them out of puddles, observing snowflakes, orienting ourselves in space by orienting a mirror around ourselves with guidance, imagining shapes in the clouds, making and discovering a sensory trail with our feet, making a perfume with what we have around us, creating with ropes, making a mandala with the elements of nature, Japanese garden, making fire, recognizing plants, cooking with what we've picked, ...
Locations are generally the Forêt de Soignes, the Etangs de 7 Fontaines and the Bois de Halle. If the weather doesn't allow us to spend a day in the forest near the ponds, we can take shelter and explore from there.
For wild plant events with adultsWe'll take you on a walk with a sense of awareness, observe and learn to recognize plants that we can easily cook. Sometimes the walk is followed by a little tasting, at other times it will be followed by time in the kitchen to learn how to prepare what we've found.
Please do not hesitate to contact me for further information.