The child learns through active exploration of the environment, they develop working theories for making sense of the natural, social physical and material worlds.

Ministry of Education (2017) Te Whāriki: New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum

Early Childhood Curriculum strongly recommend to provide young children with first hand experience when it comes to nature. We at Little Buddies also believe that children learn through active exploration of the environment, they develop working theories for making sense of the natural, physical and material worlds. To ensure our children get connected with nature and animals we have invited farm animals to visit our centres many times. Teachers, before every visit of farm animals, read interesting stories to children in group sessions and mat times to enrich their imagination and interest in nature.  Animals that visited us includes calves, goats, alpacas, a donkey, ponies, a rabbit and a chicken. The children got to feed the calves and goats, rode on the pony and experienced brushing the beautiful white pony hair. It was exciting for our children to pat little bunnies and rabbits. Children were overjoyed to be surrounded by different farm animals as most of them might have only experienced them in stories and videos.

This helps our children to develop an understanding about caring for the environment, animals, and for themselves. It provides plenty of opportunities for outdoor learning, how to behave around animals. All of them had opportunities to feed, and brush some animals as well. The visit of farm animals sparked the interest in children for the first time to make animals drink milk, eat pallets and they enjoyed feeding them. Apart from that, this also helped our children to connect links with stories and books they have been read to about animals.