Nature and Children One Minute at a Time

STEM
Nature
Cycles
Environmental & Science Education
Earth Science
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

How children see and experience nature is the aim of 1Minute Nature films, one that they meet again and again.

The team begins developing content for these films "by interviewing children with the aim of creating (short) real life stories with a fairytale feeling, and then bringing the audio to life with animation." They are powerful as well as beautifully done. In Dutch with translations.

Here is one, a film about the death of a cat and how after death its parts gets scattered and may return, as tiny particles, maybe to become part of its former owner (actually with cats it seems the other way round but...). A sweet thought if ever there was one.

This is territory that Aldo Leopold explored in Odyssey, a short essay in A Sand County Almanac. Leopold begins with an atom, X, locked in a limestone rock laid down in a Paleozoic sea and traces its history from then to the present as it passes through one living thing to another back ultimately to the sea, its former prison.  This is a lesson on how we live fast and die often. The cosmic bargain life makes.

There are many books on the death of the animals we choose to live with us, those critters which have a way of insinuating themselves into our lives.

One is the familiar and lovely The Tenth Good Thing About Barney by Judith Viorst, illustrated by Erik Blegvad.  Cat Barney dies and the mother of the boy says they can have a funeral and that he should think of 10 things about Barney that he can talk about at the funeral. He can think of nine but gradually discovers the tenth.  There is an eleventh which this 1Minute Nature film points out.

I'm more than likely to post other 1Minute Nature films.