Our presenter may have had poet ee cummings in mind, when he started by asking us to share in pairs our fondest childhood memories of outdoor play. Then he collected some of the stories: climbing trees, collecting acorns, rolling down hills, making food from bark and mud, having lemon wars (in California!). All these memories, he noted, had to do with nature. There were no swing sets or climbing gyms, not even any soccer practice or baseball games.
His name is Ken Finch, and he is the director of Green Hearts Institute for Nature in Childhood, whose goal is to bring children and nature back together. This was a group of early childhood educators, meeting at venerable Smith Playground in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, dreaming together about the possibility of creating a nature preschool there. But his message is just as much for parents, and maybe even more.
He shocked us with the numbers. American children now spend 27 percent of their time engaged with screens and other electronic media. They spend only one percent of their time these days outside at all, and that includes all organized sports and outdoor play. For the activities that evoked the fondest memories from everyone in this group—unstructured interaction with nature—today’s children have an average of only 30 minutes a week!
I loved his story about how he handled his own children’s uncertainly about how to make the most of play in their backyard. He removed the sod from a ten foot square area of the lawn, bought several child-sized—but real—shovels, and waited to see what would happen. They started to dig. Then they started to bury things and dig them up. When their interest began to flag, he introduced the hose. With this new element, they had everything they needed for endless play, and neighborhood children whom they didn’t even know started knocking on the door and asking if they could come play in the dirt.
His booklet, A Parents’ Guide to Nature Play, offers lots of ideas—beyond creating a dirt pile—on how to “kidscape” your yard. He suggests introducing water, along with lots of ways to move it around; outdoor seating or a hammock in a sheltered spot; shrubberies for kid-sized hide-aways; a mix of ferns, tall grasses, perennial flowers, shrubs and trees; logs and boulders for playing on; vegetables and berries; loose parts for kid-build forts or dens; leaf piles; butterfly gardens. He suggests ways to play as a family, nature play tools and toys to keep handy, and simple guidelines for keeping it safe.
Clearly there is a lot that we can do at home as parents to encourage the play that children have always loved so much. But what about our early childhood education programs? Most give a nod to nature at one time or another in their classrooms, often with bean seeds in Dixie cups on a window sill. Some have outdoor play space that includes real natural elements (as contrasted with pre-fab plastic log “cookies”). Many take occasional field trips to outdoor places. A few will explore nature intensively through an emergent curriculum project.
Ken Finch is advocating for much more. He speaks of nature pre-schools as programs that use a natural area as a regular focus, with children going outside every day to enjoy loosely-structured explorations together and play in natural settings, with their own interests and discoveries guiding the exploration, rather than any predetermined activity outlines or academic goals and objectives. While there are indoor activities as well, natural themes and materials continue to play a prominent role.
In a way it seems sad to have to plan for and organize unstructured outdoor play for small children, but it sure seems better than having them cooped up indoors, glued to screens, getting fat. Research has shown that free and unstructured play is essential for helping children reach important social, emotional, and cognitive developmental milestones, and an early love for nature is the strongest indicator for adults who care about the environment. So the vision of a nature preschool at Smith Playground is an exciting one. In the meantime, many early childhood programs are taking small steps toward environmental awareness, and there are always plenty of ways to get out and play.
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