Workshops

This is a project based on local research which invited children from a Berlin kindergarten (from 3 to 5 years old) to use gardening and landscaping approaches to actively explore history and territory of the Tiergarten; a huge park just next to their door. We visited historical moments and sites of Tiergarten, Berlin and Brandenburg.

The children participated in activities with insights in garden design, ornithology, geology, botany among other areas, through weekly workshops involving theory and practice.
Through their own gardening work and objects we helped them to produce during the workshops the children contributed to the design of the kindergarden's playground and changed its overall looks.

Here are the objectives of the project.

• Introducing the kids to local history and the concept of change and time
  
• Making links between their own actions and activities (the workshops in their garden) to a bigger context (that of the park)
  
• Introducing them to landscaping, re-imagining and shaping space through simple tools, digging, placing, planting
  
• introducing kids to art work that breaks with overused formats such as painting
  
• Investigating animals and their importance for the equilibrium of the ecosystem and the relevance of these species in a big city like Berlin
• Using a sensual experience to create an art work
  

Here are some of the workshops

Lenne- Gartengestaltung (Garden Design)

Peter Joseph Lenné was a Prussian garden artist and landscape architect († 23. Januar 1866 in Potsdam). He transformed the Tiergarten into a people's place. We did the same with the Kita garden. To begin with we showed the kids maps and plans from the park. And then created a map for their garden followed by everyone placing and distributing the different symbols made from differntly coloured paper, in the garden plan: water elements, trees, grass, bushes and flowers.

Berliner Urstromtal (Berlin's glacier valley) - a glacier in the sand box

This experiment reproduced on a small scale how the flat lands with swamps, rivers and slow flowing water of the region were formed by a melting glacier. The realization consists of reproducing all these phenomena in the sand box. A block of ice (30Kg) is left in the box to melt down and the kids are asked to observe and imagine or draw out how a river bed is formed in the sand.

Insect Hotels- the Tiergarten as a habitat

With a small wooden box, few bamboo sticks and some kilos of clay we made amazing new places for this small and very necessary animals. The children instantly understood the connection between the existence of these creatures and the health of any big forest or garden.

Insekten Hotel- Insect Hotel

Wasserlandschaften in Wannen, swamps in tubs

The lands of Brandenburg are naturally sandy and covered with the spree waters and other swamps and lakes and with it an enormous range of fauna and flora became attracted by its conditions. We reproduced this habitat in one of our garden's corners.

Gemüseanbau im Tiergarten im 2. Weltkrieg,
horticulture in the park during 2nd World War

The Tiergarten park has been passing through many different situations. During times of great poverty (WWII) Berliner's used it as a place where to cultivate their own vegetables. We made our own space in the Kita garden to plant tomatoes, green beans, pumpkins and other plants, watered them and took care every day.

Tierhabitat: Vogelhäuser, Animal Habitat: Bird Houses

Birds are one of the more abundant animals and easier to see in a park. We spend one session building 6 bird houses with different designs, some of them had 2 , 3 floors and even terraces. Finally we coloured them with oil and colourant. Later we hanged the houses from the trees in a visible places.





Tiergartenausflüge, Trips to the Tiergarten

We made 2 trips to the Tiergarten one with a ex Tiergarten manager, who taught us about the different animals which live in the Tiergarten, the canals systems that regulate the water and the use of organic material recycled from the autumn leaves. On the second trip with a nature paedadgogue, we visited wild geese and played games learning and imitating animals' activities like feeding the bird child in the nest and watching out for food. Children seem to be passionate about knowledge and enjoying to see the theory applied to the practice.

Bäume pflanzen, Planting Trees

Trees had been playing many different roles inside the Tiergarten, design elements, as protection for animals when being hunted, and finally as a resource to combat one of the coldest winters of the Berliner's history at the end of the WWII. Keeping this in mind and the massive replanting of the Tiergarten that started in 1949 we planted in the kindergarden trees and bushes as the kids planned on their designs.

Zeichenfest, Drawing party

Finally, On the last workshop we used big wooden plaques where the kids illustrated the most representative workshops we did together. They painted vegetables, animals, rivers, insects and trees, afterwards we fixed the wooden plaques on the wall of the kindergarden. A farewell party followed a few days later and hopefully leaving some wonders of the big Tiergarten with them.

This project was developed and produced by Birgit Binder, Anja Bodanowitz and Jorda Planellas in early 2009. Thanks for the financial support from Cultural Council Mitte and AstA of the UdK.

Thanks for collaborating with us: Kindertagesstätte am Siegmundshof - Berlin Tiergarten, the former park manager Mr.Schaaf and the nature paedagogue Mrs.Knief-Schneiker from BUND.