the worms have come inside

One of my favourite quotes is from Marcel Proust:

“the true voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new horizons but of seeing with new eyes”.

One of the things I love about this job is that the children are always looking with new eyes…and so I see things afresh as well.

The worms have come inside for us to study them more closely.

We used the new digital microscope to look at them  in detail. I wondered if they would notice the segments – the lack of eyes and ears? not yet, what they saw was the speed or slowness, the way they felt – the sheer mass of them all…..

Jonty thinks of groups in terms of families – so the tangled mass of worms in his hand is a family, he plays dinosaur families, and the animals are always in families. Jonty is very family-oriented!

We have had rather too much (say the adults, anyway) of nature lately, with swarms of locusts descending on us…we notice the smell of roasted grasshopper when we stop the car, the bleary yellow smears on our windscreens, the damage done to gardens and new fodder crops, and we think about what might be coming in the spring. For the children, it’s exciting – the “grasshoppers” jump – they fly – they don’t bite – they are in the air around us – you can catch one, if you are quick, and hold it in your hand. Several of the children made homes for their new pets out of recycled yoghurt pots, and took them home…..

Elliott has a new pet.