However, we intend to be running Taleblazers for a very long time! This means that DSRT could be waiting a long time before sharing any financial success. We have therefore decided to make a donation of £250 as a New Year’s gift to DSRT, as a kind of interim statement of our ongoing investment in the community and our desire for other organisations we love to benefit from our success.

Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team are a voluntary charity who help the emergency services to search for and rescue lost, missing, injured and vulnerable people. We most frequently associate them with finding lost walkers on the moors but they are also active in helping to find vulnerable people such as people with dementia, children and people experiencing mental health crises. Over 90% of their income is from donations and we are delighted to be in a position to support them.

At the same time, we have also decided to donate £100 to one of our favourite charities, the John Muir Trust, who conserve, protect and restore wild places across the UK. We share their passion for wild places and their John Muir Award programmes are central to our education work.

We also looked at the waterfalls and filtration leading to how clear the water was falling down the cliffs, and had some fun letting the cold water run through our fingers.

Recently, two of our students who are completing the John Muir Award spent an afternoon at Churston Cove, a location frequently visited by the public where seals can often be spotted enjoying the tranquil waters brimming with life.

After gaining insights into the objectives of The Seal Project, the students developed posters to raise awareness about appropriate actions when encountering seals, highlighting what to do — and behaviours to avoid. We also learned about the small population of Common Seals that visit the Bay, and the subtle differences in their appearance.

The students independently designed their own posters and were given the option to focus on either an anti-litter message or cautioning the public against feeding seals. Litter can ensnare seals in plastic, hindering their ability to feed properly. Directly feeding them can also lead to excessive dependence on humans or expose seals and humans to potential harm.

This was an issue for Devon and Cornwall police as recently as last year, with a seal named ‘Spearmint’ becoming vulnerable to anti-social behaviour, dog attacks and physical harm after being habituated towards humans. In a report (ITV), a spokesperson from Devon and Cornwall Police said:

“We have received reports of seals being fed from boats within Brixham Harbour.

Feeding wild seals creates really big problems for seals and humans. Seals are quick learners and just one feed can develop habituated behaviour for life.

In their minds, food becomes linked with people and boats. This reduces their natural fear of humans and puts them at greater risk from humans and boats”.

The students did an outstanding job crafting informative posters, and we shared their creations with The Seal Project, who were equally delighted with the results. Well done!

A litter pick is also a great way for young people to get out, explore and truly appreciate the human impact upon nature in their community. You can make it competitive, or you can make it into a game: who can fill the bag first? Who can count as many different types of litter as possible?

And, after all, who can deny the satisfaction that comes with seeing a ‘before’ and ‘after’ picture of a particularly messy beach clean-up?

It’s also a great way to introduce them to the basics of conservation, citizen science, and ecology.

We can conduct litter surveys for the Marine Conservation Society, sending valuable citizen science data to scientists. We can also look for Nurdles, or plastic pellets; small lentil-sized pieces of plastic that are the building blocks for most plastic products. We can report this as part of the Great Nurdle Hunt, a citizen science project launched to monitor microplastics in our oceans and coasts. Due to their size, and often clear colour, nurdles can look like fish eggs which makes them particularly attractive to seabirds, fish and other marine wildlife ingesting them.

Every time they go out, kids can discover what types of litter they find in their environment and learn more about the kinds of things that people should be disposing of properly. It may open up a conversation (and often a quick Google) on how long it takes certain items to decompose — what about a shoe (30-40 years)? A cigarette butt (500-1000 years)? A can of Coke (250 years)?

In turn, this opens up conversations about our own plastic use and the potential impact of plastic on the food chain — including how it may come to enter our own part of the chain.

By playing an active role in cleaning up their local environment, kids become more aware of how important it is to protect nature and why we should all be doing our part to keep our environment clean. Overall, litter picking is a great way to allow our young people to continue to develop an appreciation for nature and an awareness and understanding of their own environmental impact, with their efforts recognised and celebrated with the John Muir Award.

Yet, I think part of it is also in the journey of transformation that the glass shards go through in their dance through the briny depths of the ocean.

They start as jagged and rough pieces, but as they weather through time and tide, they turn into something beautiful; jewel-like and rounded. In the same way, life shapes us; softens our edges. Like the movement of the waves, every obstacle that we face adds to who we are. A small piece of sea glass may have withstood a hundred years of storms and winters to become a piece that a child picks up and says, ‘Wow, come over here and look at this one!’

Stood on the sea shore hunting for this treasure, we are reminded of the infinite capacity for growth and transformation that we each carry within ourselves. Like the sea glass, we are at once both fragile and strong, each obstacle contributing to the mosaic of ourselves.

Working with children, I will often remark on this change, commenting that sometimes the pieces that have been through the hardest journeys are the most beautiful. If we had picked it up in a car park, would we feel the same? Why is it that we feel it’s more special when it has been in the sea?

We arrived just before 10am, but tried to experiment with creating an illusion of many different times of the day through the photos.

All of these photos were taken by one of our secondary students, exploring a new wild place.

Today we have been thinking about changes that we would like to make and what we would like to ‘let go’ of in the coming year. How can we make ourselves feel a little lighter? How would we like to feel by the end of this year? What sort of person would we like to be?

Our students wrote in chalk on rocks what they were leaving behind in 2022, and then we threw them into the sea. It was very cathartic. It feels even better when you do a big roar as you do it, like a professional tennis player.

Then we wrote a message to ourselves to keep for 2023. What would you throw into the sea? What would your message be, to your future self?

The journey of connection with nature encourages students to slow down, observe, and truly engage with the natural world. They begin to notice the intricate details that often go unnoticed – the play of light on the sea, the gentle crunch of sand underfoot, the scent of seaweed; the texture of the rock that they are perched on. This connection cultivates a sense of awe, wonder, and appreciation for the beauty and complexity of the environment surrounding them.

With a concise structure and strict syllable count of the haiku (5-7-5), they have the opportunity to explore their creativity within defined parameters; the page is not an overwhelming blank space, but a series of sounds and rhythms to play with. By drawing inspiration from nature, students can experiment with language, metaphor, and imagery. This process nurtures their artistic expression and helps to develop fundamental literary skills.

I took two students to Churston Cove, and we both sat for a while amidst the quiet of a December day. I love taking older students to the same place on the same day and seeing how different or similar their haikus are, despite the environment being relatively unchanged. Perhaps on a grey and foggy day, the mist may seem all-encompassing; overwhelming, and difficult to ignore. On a sunny day, we may be able to pay more attention to the movements around us; the sound of gulls, or the children playing on the shore.

When students link the practice of writing haikus outdoors to the John Muir Award, their poetic expressions align with the award programme’s goals. The John Muir Award encourages individuals to discover, explore, conserve, and share wild places. Through haikus, students can document their encounters with the natural world, share their experiences with others, and contribute to the conservation narrative. This connection amplifies the significance of their experiences, deepening a connection with nature, and hopefully, that all-important mind-body connection too.

Focusing on observing a category often leaders to a deeper understanding of it. A collector of sea glass may grow to learn that green and white varieties are rather common, whereas a rare blue or red feels like a rare jewel. Similarly, students can harness that type of focus by taking inspiration from field guides. Any topic will gradually encourage students to explore a world that they might otherwise overlook, deepening their understanding of their local ecosystems. For example, studying what birds are most commonly seen at this beach? At this pond? At this marsh?

If a student studies a gathering of birds, they begin to notice the birds wherever they go; even if they do not recall the proper names for them. If students look for textures in their environment, they will begin to see objects, relationships and patterns between ‘squidgy’ things and ‘rough’ things. Exploring with a narrow focus leads to curiousity: what are the similarities and differences between the animals and/or objects? This paves the way for deeper learning about scientific concepts. It is the noticing that is most important.

With younger students, field guides or ID sheets work to pose a fun challenge: ‘Can you see….?’ or ‘can you find…?’. We describe the features of that bird aloud and tick them off as we find them. Yes, a Moorhen! We can play with trying to emulate the sounds of the birds too.

Older students can begin to make their own field guides to birds, plants, or other features of the landscape — making a collection of identifiable species is a great way to explore the environment and record our own findings and observations. How many other people noticed this bird, at this time, on this day? It is a reminder that our voice, our observations, count.