In the video, the camera moves over an open area, and it captures slowly moving leaves in the wind, flickering light on the branches and subtle natural sounds in the background that sum up. The movement of air, leaves, and a low background noise is rhythmic and simultaneously soothing and dynamic. The video offers room for the spectator to listen intensely.

In my creative work – the dramatic monologue as spoken by a 3–4 year old child – the environmental sounds were made sense of with the support of creative imagination. The birds were not just chirping; they became the orchestra. The rustling leaves were made sense of as clapping in approval of an action or character. This showed how children access the discourse of sound/music and impose their own meaning. Reading Wilson (2007) made me realize how children's discourse of sound/music makes it possible for them to use layers of rhythm, tone and texture for play by moving their meaning. Wilson (2007)'s example of children putting music without the use of an instrument in a lesson suggests children have the capacity to make nature an open-ended score and construct their own music from natural characteristics of a place. What this has teaching potential for me as a practitioner is that I now see sound walks and listening games as methodologies that have the potential to extend children's musical and imaginative experience of place.

This made my mind recall Edwards, Gandini, and Forman's (2011) hundred languages of children. Movement is included among those languages, among children's ways of making sense of the world. A child will not necessarily have to explain in words. They may instead dance like a tree, stomp like thunder, or run like the wind. Those movements are a way of speaking, a way of linking the visual to the kinesthetic.

I would consider how children would have more freedom of movement in responding to nature. Perhaps it would be dancing to the rhythm of the rain, making "shadow dances," or mimicking slow and quick movements they observe in the world. Movement is another way of being heard and another way of being spoken.

As Hamm (2015) elaborates in the piece, "walking with place" entails "educators and children taking respectful and responsive relationships with Country" (par. 6). I was reminded of that idea at the end of my story. I didn't just play with the mountain and the lake; I expressed gratitude. The act of showing gratitude made me aware of how drama is at its most fun and its most profound. Drama calls upon children to dream, play, laugh, make the world a playground. By such acts, drama may also teach children how to have reverence and responsibility for those places they play on.

Using nothing more than voices and imagination, children are able to create the landscape into a stage. More significantly, by virtue of such, they may learn that the stage itself, i.e., land, sea, trees, etc., is alive and should be appreciated.

Hamm, C. (2015). Walking With Place: Storying Reconciliation Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education. Canadian Children, 40(2), 56–66.

Wilson, Ruth, and Ruth Wilson. Nature and Young Children : Encouraging Creative Play and Learning in Natural Environments, Routledge, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, h