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Article: How much do our children visit Nature?
- Thread starter Tony
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Interesting article.
Suggestion: take your kids to Scouts/Cubs/Beavers. Better yet, volunteer to help with your local district. Offer a few nights if you can't be more regular. You'll enjoy it and the (and your) kids will appreciate your efforts. BCUK members have such a lot to offer that other folk need help with, such as fires, shelters and tracking. Even knots can challenge some leaders who are otherwise very good and run excellent sessions. If you can manage to give a hand, please do so.
Suggestion: take your kids to Scouts/Cubs/Beavers. Better yet, volunteer to help with your local district. Offer a few nights if you can't be more regular. You'll enjoy it and the (and your) kids will appreciate your efforts. BCUK members have such a lot to offer that other folk need help with, such as fires, shelters and tracking. Even knots can challenge some leaders who are otherwise very good and run excellent sessions. If you can manage to give a hand, please do so.
Yes, interesting indeed. As an educator I am particularly interested in these findings. I would like to think, however, that in schools the situation is improving. The lunatic H&S culture seems to have moderated; teachers were afraid to take children out of the classroom for fear of litigation, in fact my union actually advised us not to take any extra-mural trips. The ongoing issue seems to be the results driven assessments of schools. You cannot measure the benefits of introducing children to the natural world empirically; school league tables are interested in test results. School leaders struggle to justify time and investment in getting children outside.
At my school I am very lucky. We have a programme that starts with 4 year olds going on "Teddy Bears' Picnics" leading to DofE Gold Awards to 18 year olds. We have a 14 acre patch of ancient thicket adjacent to the school owned by the National Trust. Despite this, and my own interests in getting out, we find it very difficult to get the children out as much as we would like. It's not the time required for the trips that we lack, it's planning, risk assessing and training time that we're short of.
At my school I am very lucky. We have a programme that starts with 4 year olds going on "Teddy Bears' Picnics" leading to DofE Gold Awards to 18 year olds. We have a 14 acre patch of ancient thicket adjacent to the school owned by the National Trust. Despite this, and my own interests in getting out, we find it very difficult to get the children out as much as we would like. It's not the time required for the trips that we lack, it's planning, risk assessing and training time that we're short of.
Some interesting reading there. I think one of the things that worries me is that even though I live in a small village a lot of the kids don't interact with nature. We're also lucky in that there is an outdoor education preschool place near here and also the local primary kids have access to the woods for some of their class time with structured outdoor lessons. Despite this the large glut of wild seasonal fruit (and there's a fair bit of it, apples, raspberries, brambles and gooseberries) go totally untouched, even those that are growing over the school playground wall. I talked to some of the parents about it and was told that the children were told never to pick wild fruit, no matter what.
Growing up as I did in Angus school holidays were set so that the soft fruit harvests could be picked and child labour was the norm. It meant we had money to spend and we also got a free feed too. Anything wild and edible was quickly scoffed or taken home to share with the family for pudding.
So although some of the kids are getting out there I wonder as to the level of their interaction. I was pleased as punch to see that a couple of kids (turned out they were a friends offspring) had been making a den in the woods. Hadn't seen kids doing that in an age. It's great to see kids that are totally at home in the outdoors rather than looking like they're visiting an expensive china shop where they don't touch anything.
Growing up as I did in Angus school holidays were set so that the soft fruit harvests could be picked and child labour was the norm. It meant we had money to spend and we also got a free feed too. Anything wild and edible was quickly scoffed or taken home to share with the family for pudding.
So although some of the kids are getting out there I wonder as to the level of their interaction. I was pleased as punch to see that a couple of kids (turned out they were a friends offspring) had been making a den in the woods. Hadn't seen kids doing that in an age. It's great to see kids that are totally at home in the outdoors rather than looking like they're visiting an expensive china shop where they don't touch anything.
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