Nature schools are helping make outdoor play a priority for a generation of kids suffering from nature-deficit disorder. Nowadays, children enter kindergarten having watched, on average, 5,000 hours of television. iPads, iPhones, and the push to show early academic achievement by memorizing shapes and colours from the age of two, has pulled them away from creative play and the open air.
In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, journalist Richard Louvre argued that children need to unplug themselves from their computers and smart phones and reconnect with the original way of learning about the world: by wandering around outside. The book, naturally, was a big hit with environmentalists.
So, last summer i enrolled my year-and-a-half-old daughter in a parent-child class at the Brooklyn Forest School in Prospect Park. We walked to the park once a week and met up with other families to pour some water on dirt to make mud, poke a stick in the water, and sing songs. The forest school is not a new concept, and programmes like this one are becoming increasingly popular.
Studies show that in schools with an environmental education component, students score higher on tests in maths, reading, writing, and listening than their non-nature exposed mates. Other positive effects include improved critical thinking, problem solving, and cooperation. And there are health benefits, too: kids who play outside more often are less likely to develop illnesses.
On some days last summer, when it was extremely hot I told myself we could just do this on our own without paying for it. After all, many of our activities mirrored those of my own childhood.
As we walked through the park, I accidentally spilled some water and I thought to employ a lesson from forest school: make mud. We took turns squishing the mud, spreading it on the bark of a nearby tree, and picking out leaves to stick to our "sculpture." Since then, my daughter increasingly stops while we are walking the dog in the park and sits down to get dirty in leaf piles. There is a lot of pasting clumps of dirt onto exposed tree roots, and a lot of curious glances from passers by. It is often hard to get her to leave her mud creations behind, and we are both happier for it.
