I helped out on another Local Journeys project recently, a workshop project called ‘World of Small’, with Crockerne Pill Junior school.

Items collected by children near a pond and photographed with digital microscope

The first of two sessions planned was an exploration walk through a wood not far from the school alongside a stream with story-making, finding Small Things (photographs of what we’d hoped they’d see, taken a few days before the workshop are below), creating clay models of some small creatures then placing these in the roots of huge old fallen tree. But shortly before the children were about to arrive for their walk, we found the stream-side path had disappeared under flood water!

Local knowledge, years of experience, flexible teachers and helpers and quick thinking by everyone involved allowed the project to be relocated to a local pond where children observed and collected small things – still in the company of a rather damp storyteller and a natural historian. They found plenty of strange and wonderful objects – even if they weren’t what we were originally expecting! These were taken back to the classroom where we worked with the children to photograph their micro treasures with a digital microscope alongside developing stories around the idea of being – and surviving as – a very small creature in the world. The image above is a montage of some of the minute items the junior investigators found in the wild, magically transformed through the microscope.

The wood-world from a small perspective