Natural Wonder:Learning About Nature by Experiencing Nature

Natural Wonder

Learning About Nature By Experiencing Nature

Children on a Children's Nature Institute nature walk making a spider discovery before even hitting the trail!

Young children have a natural sense of wonder. Moments are filled with the immediate. When children are in the outdoors their senses are stimulated, their hearts beat fast, their minds are filled with questions about what they see, feel, hear, smell. If young children are allowed this awe-filled experience in nature their connection to the Earth will be personal and visceral. So often, however, we expose very young children to the “idea” of the environment rather than giving them the “experience” of their environment.

Environmental education often takes place indoors and is often filled with images of distant rain forests and tales of suffering antarctic creatures. Children, being openly empathetic towards other creatures are easily effected by this information. If this is their initial and primary connection to the natural world – through a feeling of despair for a far away place – nature becomes something abstract, distant, and in pain.

I propose that we give young children, who have not yet developed the capacity for abstraction, an introduction to nature through the joy of wonder and discovery. Let children play outside and connect to the world just around them. Let us help them build a love for the environment they can touch, feel, see, smell, and hear. Children want to know more about that which they love. When they do grow older and hear tales of far-off places the distance on a map may be great but their personal connection could not be closer.

"If love comes first, knowledge is sure to follow." - John Burroughs

Resources

There are several books and magazines that promote connecting children to nature by taking them into nature. You can also check the links on the right for organizations that offer nature programs for youth. If you know of any additional resources please share!

Beyond Ecophobia – Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education – David Sobel

Last Child in the Woods – Richard Louv

Place-Based Education – David Sobel

Small Wonders- Nature Education for Young Children – Linda Garrett, et al

Sharing Nature With Children – Joseph Bharat Cornell

Biophillia – E.O. Wilson

10 Fun Ways to Enjoy the Great Outdoors (Parents Magazine article) – Winifred Yu

The Way We Live Now – Natural Happiness (New York Times Magazine article) – Paul Bloom

- Ilana Gustafson Turner

Unplugged Schools? – Orion Magazine

This is an excerpt from an excellent article on the need for schools to provide a balance to the over saturation of technology children receive in their daily lives. To see the entire article please follow this link. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/334/ Please check out Orion Magazine itself while you’re at it. They provide a beautiful discourse on the philosophies of environmentalism.

- Ilana Gustafson Turner

See Our January Calendar of Outdoor Events for Los Angeles Youth

Is it Time to Unplug Our Schools?

by Lowell Monke

AN EXCERPT – See entire article here.

“THE HEALTH OF OUR CHILDREN’S INNER LIVES, their civic engagement, and their relationship with nature all would be improved if schools turned down the thermostat on that technologically overheated aspect of American culture. Schools dedicated to that task—we might call them “unplugged schools”—would identify the values associated with technological culture and design curricula and an environment focused on strengthening the human values at the other end of the scale.

The most obvious thing schools can do in this regard is give children experiences with the real things toward which symbols are only dim pointers. Unless emotionally connected to some direct experience with the world, symbols reach kids as merely arbitrary bits of data. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to a second grader who has held a squiggly nightcrawler in her hand, even the printed symbol “worm” resonates with far deeper meaning than a thousand pictures or a dozen Discovery Channel videos. “

“So much daily communication is now mediated by machines that the U.S. News & World Report has estimated that youth graduating from schools today have had about one-third fewer face-to-face conversations than their parents had when they came out of school. Unplugged schools would compensate for this by creating an environment teeming with adults and older students conversing with, telling stories to, and working directly with younger students. Resources and time spent by other schools to integrate technology into the classroom would be spent integrating community members.”

“he efforts to label and sort children while constantly seeking technical means to accelerate, enhance, and otherwise tinker with their intellectual, emotional, and physical development are acts of mechanistic abuse (there is really no other name for it) committed against children’s nature. There is no more critical task for schools than to counter this unfolding tragedy. Schools can make headway simply by patiently honoring and nurturing each child’s internally timed, naturally unfolding developmental growth, by abandoning anxious efforts to hurry children toward adulthood, and by giving these young souls time to heal from the wounds inflicted by a culture that shows no respect for childhood innocence. As Richard Louv and others have argued, nature is a particularly effective antidote for this condition. Eliminating the clock as the means of governing everything is another more modest but important move. However it is undertaken, what is important to recognize is that compensating for the dominant view of children-as-mechanisms is, at its core, spiritual work. It acknowledges that some facet of a child’s inner life must remain sacred—off-limits to our machinations—to be viewed not as new territory for scientific investigation and technical manipulation but simply with awe and reverence and our own best, most human, expressions of support. To grant the dignity of that inner core is perhaps the most important gift unplugged schools can give children in the technological age. And, in turn, to foster within children those once universal but now nearly extinct childhood qualities of awe and reverence is spiritual education in its most elemental sense.”