
We all want our children to spend more time outdoors. However when you live in a city, connecting our children to nature can be difficult.
In this series of blog posts, I hope to inspire you with some ways you can teach your children about the natural world, and give you some creative activities to do indoors or in a city garden.
Spending time outdoors in a natural environment has been proven scientifically to benefit children.
Since the release of the book Last Child in the Woods, which brought attention to the developmental effects of nature on our children, there have been multiple studies that prove likewise.
Some of the benefits of outdoor play include:
- Supports development intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually and
physically (Kellert, 2005).
- Encourages creativity: Studies show that children engage
in more creative forms of play in the green areas. (Bell and Dyment,
2006).
- Improves Concrentration: Exposure to natural settings increases
children’s ability to focus and enhances cognitive
abilities (Wells, 2000).
- Improves Academic Performance: Children who partook in outdoor
science programs had an improvement in their science results by 27% (American Institutes for Research, 2005).
- Reduces ADD symptoms (Kuo and Taylor, 2004).
- Improves eyesight (American
Academy of Ophthalmology, 2011)
- Encourages healthy eating (Bell &
Dyment, 2008)
- Reduces stress (Wells and
Evans, 2003)
Book Recommendation
It is fantastic. Unlike most nature books, it is not just pages of facts, but it also poses lots of questions for the children to answer and gives great ideas for outdoor activities and experiments.
This is what we have been doing this March:
Observing Germination
, that Sunflowers
, Nasturtiums
and Runner Beans
are easy to grow…we’ll soon see!
seeds in the gap between the glass and the tissue. Then we added enough water the to jars to make the tissue damp, and left them on a sunny window-sill.
Began Planting Our Children’s Garden
Looking for catkins
Visited our City Parks
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Drawing daffodils |
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Playing hide-and-seek! He’s counting… |
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He’s hiding! |
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