Raising your children in wide open spaces will provide them with a never-ending amount of hands-on learning opportunities. You don’t have to head to the country to get the kids outside more, but it certainly does help! Learning by experience from the land will happen effortlessly as soon as children are exposed to it and the interesting lessons last a lifetime. Nature is a class room that is always available to us.
One of the unexpected benefits of moving to an outskirt home was that my son began learning directly from nature. His outside time tripled and what he witnessed sent him digging through every book we owned to identify birds, bugs, snakes and the other oddities he stumbled across. Not learning was impossible; he would not rest until books or the internet provided the answer for his questions.
Mother Nature is a Hands-On Teacher
Nature may be a classroom but she is notably short on printed material. No wonder kids never seem to tire of her lessons! She offers the everyday alongside the incredible, the mundane beside the rare, the possible juxtaposed with the “how is that possible?” thriving right next to it. She is a patient, fair teacher who allows the seasons to guide her children’s studies and natural consequences to discipline them.
Ever run across a pasture barefoot when sticker plants hold aloft their sharp, dried seeds ready to pierce your skin? “Look where you step, tread carefully and protect your feet”, Mother Nature says. “Take the time to do things right, like putting your shoes on first.”
Learning from our Five Senses
Kids touch everything and are naturally curious. The 2,500 nerve endings per square centimeter in the human hand are linked directly to the brain and should be put to use in learning!
A handful of fresh-laid eggs feel surprisingly hot – why? Because a chicken’s natural body temperature is 107°F; warm enough to stop frostbite should you hold your fingers against her body on a below-freezing morning.
A small, smooth snake is found under the blueberry bush – why? He is eating the bugs that are beginning to infest the ground level leaves. The bush needs to be trimmed and sprayed with a bit of soapy water to stop the insects. The snake is beneficial and is welcome in the garden.
Strange mud “volcanoes” dot the yard – why? They are the homes of burrowing crayfish, who dig down to the water table to live. We don’t see them during the day so they must be nocturnal, which is good because the chickens LOVE to eat them!
Critical Thinking is Critically Lacking – So Dig Some Up!
Tunneling to discover who made the mud volcanoes or raiding the hen’s nest box can’t be learned by doing a worksheet. Such experiences exercise our children’s abilities to observe, reason, and come to logical conclusions about the world around them. Our children desperately need Mother Nature’s intervention to help them develop the skills of observation and critical thinking.
Old-Fashioned Know-How
I collect antique school books. Among my collection is one 1880 copy of “The Child’s Book of Nature”, originally written in 1857. Meant for school and home use, it contains 32 chapter lessons on the basic truths about nature kids would have needed to know: seeds, roots, flowers, sap, pollinators and other topics. The book insists lessons are not to begin until actual flowers, sprouting seeds and roots are in the children’s hands. This would have been vital knowledge for an agrarian society since most children helped their families produce food. Should our own learning be so disconnected from nature simply because we have grocery stores, high rise buildings and the internet?
Here is one excerpt from the chapter What is Made from Sap:
“The way in which sugar is made perfectly white, it is said, was discovered in a curious way. A hen that had gone through a clay mud-puddle went with her muddy feet into a sugar-house. She left her tracks on a pile of sugar. It was observed by someone that wherever her tracks were, the sugar was whitened. This led to some experiments. The result was, that wet clay came to be used in refining sugar. It is used in this way. The sugar is put into earthen jars shaped as you see the sugar-loves are. [Conical in shape.] The large ends are upward. The small ends have a hole in them. The clay is put on top of the sugar in the large end of the jar, and it is kept wet. The moisture goes down through the sugar and drops from the hole in the small end of the jar. This makes the sugar perfectly white.
This discovery shows how much a little looking that thinking will together do. What the hen did was a small thing. One would hardly suppose that any thing could be learned from a hen’s tracks. Most would have scraped off the mud from the pile of sugar, and thought nothing more of it. But the man who saw the tracks was in the habit of thinking about what he saw. And so he discovered in that hen’s tracks a very useful fact. If you always thing about what you see you may some time be a discoverer too. At any rate, that is the way to learn. And it is to help you in learning to think about what you see that I have written this book.”
Catch the Eyes
There is so much beauty in nature, it can’t help but captivate us highly-visual humans. Why aren’t we in the garden, the woods or the playing field all the time, enjoying the same past-times as our ancestors? What has lured us away?
Screens and the Theft of Childhood
Nature-based hands-on learning is now a luxury; an educational opportunity reserved for the wealthy, the fortunate whose parents are aware or the very lucky. Nowadays our children have iPads handed to them in toddlerhood, are screen addicted by Kindergarten then rarely seen without their video games and phones by their teenage years.
How the wealthy protect their children’s minds
The New York Times wrote two articles that I found eye-opening and provoking. They wrote that Steve Jobs didn’t allow his children to use iPads and limited how much technology was used in their home because he, and other executives, understood the dangers of technology firsthand. Another article mentioned that employees of Silicon Valley giants were sending their children to technology-free Waldorf schools where they instead engaged in hands-on learning. Screens are not allowed in these Waldorf class rooms.
“The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.”
It feels a little unfair that the tech giants who sold such addicting technologies have quietly preserved their own children while never bothering to warn us. What do we do now?
We Can’t Just turn our kids loose in the Woods…Right?
While we can’t completely do that, we can certainly give them more exposure to nature. School time generally requires that outside play be an extracurricular activity but that doesn’t diminish Mother Nature’s powerful effects in the slightest. If you can safeguard their outdoor time to ensure your children do get into nature regularly, they will reap positive benefits.
Some Tools Required
This post contains affiliate links to delightful items I have personally bought, used and/or given as gifts!
Booting the kids out of the house with no tools to help them begin playing is likely to result in whining. Outside toys and tools are among the least expensive, sturdy playthings you can buy. It is a wonder to me they aren’t given as gifts more often. I’ll show you some of the things the kids are constantly pulling out of the garage to play with around here:
For Christmas my grandmother sent my sixth grade son a fishing net. He loved it and I find it constantly left strewn about our property, well used and delightfully dirty. A large TubTrug stores the outside toys because it is incredibly durable and easy to hose off. And why bother with play shovels when kids can tell the Wilcox trowel is the strongest? The best pool toys have been this indestructible kid’s lab set with interesting pieces that invite constant experimentation. And since kids seem to like those plastic marking flags, why not have some for sand castles?
Durable outdoor play equipment
This critter keeper housed a broad-headed skink , protecting it from the cat (who first found it) as the neighborhood kids transported it for safe release in the woods.
Our Behren’s galvanized bucket is ALWAYS being used for something and has held up 7 years and counting. Bits of PVC pipe and corners from Lowe’s plus a water hose make for awesome waterworks play. If you want to skip the hardware store, educational toy maker Querectti has turned plumbing into awesome playthings.
These are our building rocks, kept outside in a plastic milk crate, ready to play with. Does that seem too simple? Maybe so but kids love to use them all the same, especially in the sand box. The rocks came from Lowe’s, sold in the gardening section as Beach Pebbles for landscaping. (Shown is 1/4 bag of the pebbles.) Basic acrylic craft paint can make them more colorful. Don’t be deceived – each rock is the size of a child’s hand, weighty and delightfully smooth to the touch.
If your kids are more interested in wood than stone, Etsy artisans have some incredible building blocks, outside toys, mud kitchens and unique, natural offerings for indoor and out that would make stunning holiday gifts.
Kids seem irresistibly drawn to these natural items, lured outdoors to play as soon as they get their hands on them and are then kept busy for hours.
Animal Feed & Feeders
Think bird houses, hummingbird feeders and squirrel stations are mostly gifts for retired persons? Children love them! A single trip to Tractor Supply to pick up buckets, scoops, bird seed, deer corn, squirrel snacks and a few hanging feeders is enchanting for children to experience.
Getting Teens Outside
It is tricky, but not impossible, to get teenagers outside. Skip the toys and offer them good quality adult recreational equipment such as fishing rods, full scale kites, bushcraft gear, hammocks, archery equipment and (for responsible youth under adult supervision) basic power tools for beginning carpentry. Sometimes providing a fire ring where older teens are allowed to build the fire and cook with cast iron or roasting skewers is the easiest way to lure a crowd of teenagers outdoors.
The Clock is Ticking
Childhood is that blessed time – that one chance in life – where you have nothing in the world to do but learn. Earning money, paying taxes, juggling bills, and managing time has not yet invaded the life of a child. Her focus can solely be on discovering and learning how everything around her exists and functions. Once childhood is over, that chance to invest 100% of her time learning has also passed, whether she has gained enough knowledge or not. She will spend the rest of her life squeezing additional reading and education between the tasks of providing for herself, feeding herself, maintaining her living environment and a thousand other to-do’s that will demand her attention constantly. Will we parents spend our twilight years regretting the time screens and mindless internet twaddle stole from our children’s childhood? Let’s not. Let’s get back outside because nature is a class room we could all benefit by spending a little more time in!
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