The Harvard Professor David Perkins talks about learning in captivity and learning ‘in the wild’ the ‘limitless universe’ there to be explored not by being told but by inquiring, asking questions, finding out – for yourself and with a little help from your friends. Keeping imagination and insight alive is made possible when there are ‘learning destinations’ (in the language of the Children’s University) such as Hinchingbrooke Country Park.

John MacBeath, Professor Emeritus University of Cambridge and Chancellor of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire Children’s University

The vast majority of children have few connections with the natural world. The dangers of such impoverishment to children's sensitivity, creativity and understanding of life are immense. This book shows how important it is to enable children to reconnect and open doors that have been closed for far too many children for far too long.

John Bangs, former Head of Education at NUT, Honorary Fellow, University of Cambridge Faculty of Education and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education

Deb Wilenski and Caroline Wendling have watched and listened – patiently, perceptively – over months to these children, and what they have learnt from them is astonishing. To read this book is to see innocently again, and to renew your sense of words as being able to forge and conjure. It brims with the power of make-believe.

Robert Macfarlane, writer and CCI Patron

Thus the authors make visible, develop in the old photographic sense, what it is the children are doing: the learning and creating which is taking place. They preserve and translate for adults what has been called the children’s ‘high intent’, that seriousness of purpose, however light-hearted, which animates children’s free activity and informs it with educational value.

Patrick Yarker, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Applied Research in Education, UEA