Stewards for the Environment: The Benefits of Early Childhood Outdoor Education

Stewards for the Environment: The Benefits of Early Childhood Outdoor Education 

Meaghan Lightfoot

2020 Cohort

                As a child, no one was able to ever persuade me to come inside. Every day after school, you could always find me in the wooded area behind my house, running in between and climbing on the trees, building piles of leaves during the fall, exploring creeks, and looking for rocks. I’ve always felt a close connection to nature; I was raised with a high regard for the outdoors and most of the fond memories of my childhood involve those woods behind my house. So, when my Child Development teacher showed a video discussing outdoor education for children, I was intrigued. When the video presentation ended, however, I could hear the scoffs and judgmental remarks of my classmates. “That’s so dangerous.” “I would never send my child to a school like that! So irresponsible!” The news report video was entitled Kids Gone Wild: Denmark’s Forest Kindergartens, in which children were running around in the woods and climbing on trees in 5-degree weather. All this was taking place at a Forest Kindergarten in Demark, under the supervision of a teacher who encouraged the kids to roam freely in the natural environment. When asked for our opinions on outdoor education, I was the only student in the class of 30 who agreed with Denmark’s methods of outdoor learning. As a River Steward, I feel a close and personal connection to nature and the outdoors, and was able to view this video differently than my classmates. It is my belief that fostering outdoor experiences is so incredibly vital and important in the dexterity of child development, especially in a society where technology is distracting us from the natural world.

                  According to the video, 10% of Denmark’s preschools are forest schools, with the classroom being outdoors despite the weather or time of year. The number of Forest schools has doubled in Denmark in the last 20 years, and numbers continue to increase with their rising popularity. The video also addresses the issue of integrating those children who attended forest schools into the classroom environment when outdoor education is no longer offered for their age group. Research is showing that compared to 3 to 5 year-old children educated in classrooms, kids who attended forest preschools and kindergartens are less stressed, can concentrate more, and show better motor development skills. In his article Leave No Child Inside, Richard Louv points out the risks of raising children under the protection of our homes, with no outside experiences or contact, stating this causes “threats to their independent judgement and value of place, to their ability to feel awe and wonder, to their sense of stewardship for the Earth, and most immediately, threats their psychological and physical health.” He then goes on to mention that studies show that “schools that use outdoor classrooms and other forms of experiential education produce significant student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math.”

As a future environmental educator, I see the importance of getting children engaged in the natural environment at a young age, fostering a love for the environment that will hopefully stay with them throughout the course of their lives. The outdoors is a place I am passionate about, and that’s why I’m choosing to complete my service requirement at Learning Tree Farm here in Dayton,  Ohio. The farm’s mission is to facilitate learning in a traditional farm setting, allowing people to take the time to explore the outdoor area and see the interwoven connection between humans and nature first hand. Their nature preschool encourages children to develop and implement their curious minds into discovering their surrounding environment. Volunteering at the nature preschool, I’ve witnessed the excitement these kids have coming back to the farm each day, feeding and caring for the animals, and exploring the local flowers and plants. They learn how to be stewards for the environment and gain the appropriate developmental skills all through outdoor, hands on learning experiences. 

The benefits of outdoor education are endless, and the lack of outdoor educational facilities in the U.S. compared to European countries could explain issues surrounding U.S. society and the way in which we treat our environment. Access to nature is continually disappearing through deforestation, construction, pollution, and human expansion. This, along with the value our society places in technology, hinders children from forming a connection with nature. As Lauv puts it, children of our generation lack “places of initiation” or places/experiences in their life that give them a sense of awe and wonderment of our surrounding world. My first place of initiation was my backyard, and thinking about how many children do not experience that feeling of excitement pertaining to the outdoors is upsetting. I believe the next generation would benefit immensely from the implementation of more forest preschools and kindergartens such as Learning Tree Farm. Such schools would foster a love for nature vital to child development and potentially put an end to the mentality that children playing outdoors is “dangerous” or “irresponsible”.

Montgomery County Environmental Learning Center

 

Montgomery County Environmental Learning Center

Cassidy Count, 2020 Cohort

 

One of the most memorable and impactful experiences I’ve had this semester with the River Stewards Program was our field trip to the Montgomery Country Environmental Learning Center. The sophomore cohort went on this field trip on our own, and it sticks out in my memory for many different reasons. One reason being what we saw and learned at the center. We were going on a tour of the facilities, when we walk through this door and all the sudden we were in a dark hallway with a huge glass window spanning one wall, allowing us to see a huge area just filled with trash. It is hard to describe this image, but imagine an area the size of a football stadium covered in trash piles as tall as a dump truck. There were trucks in there pushing the trash all together that would be pushed in trash trucks that would come to take it to a land fill. The even more shocking part was that this was at the end of the day and most of it had already been taken for the day. I was awestruck and just stared at all of this as our leader was telling us the specifics of how much there was and how much of it could have been reused or recycled. I could tell by the looks on the rest of my cohorts’ faces that they were just as impacted by seeing this as I was. We often talk about the importance of sustainability, but seeing it was a whole different thing.

But this trip wasn’t just solemn. After we saw this, we walked into this huge room full of little games and activities about trash, recycling, and sustainability, obviously intended for kids to engage them in the subject matter. However, our cohort of 19 to 20 year-old college students spent a good 30 minutes in that room playing with the games and exploring all the different things all the while learning all about this common factor that drew us together as a program. Getting to have this hard-hitting experience, but also getting to have fun with my cohort was a really cool experience and is one of my favorite memories so far.

 

 Learn more about the Environmental Learning Center here.

 

The Lorax

The Lorax

Noel Michel, 2020 Cohort

 

 

As River Stewards, our program’s mission is to “engage in interdisciplinary and experiential learning, civic engagement, and sustainable community development around rivers;” But how do we stay motivated to accomplish this goal? Today, if you were to google how much trash is in our oceans you would see statistics such as “8 million tons of trash is dumped in the world’s oceans and rivers everyday” or “There is a plastic island the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean”. We live in a throwaway culture society where everything is just for now, and it doesn’t matter where it goes. On our last river cleanup, I could not step one foot without seeing a piece of plastic to be picked up. Because of these facts it is difficult to motivate myself to wake up early on a Saturday morning to attend a river cleanup. After all, it’s just going to be as dirty again in a week or in a month, right? Why don’t we just give up?
 

Sometimes these thoughts enter my brain, like a poison they try to coax me into giving up, into not caring. But then I remember when I was growing up learning how to read. I was a slow learner at first and was not able to read until the end of first grade, which is unusual for most children. My parents were even considering holding me back a year. When my grandmother heard of what was happening she made it her mission to help me read. One book we read together over and over and over again was The Lorax by Dr. Suess. There was a rhyme in that book that she would always have me read, it was

 “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, its not.”
 

Because my grandma took the time out of her life to work with me to learn to read I was not held back and caught up with the other students in my grade. The following year I even got a special award issued from my school saying I was above and beyond the reading level for me age group. My grandma did this because she cared and loved for me more than anything else and did not mind taking this time even if it did take her away from other tasks, took a very long time, and only showed short progress. She cared a whole awful lot and things got better. A year later she passed away of a sudden heart attack. I never forgot her, what she did for me, and the lessons I learned from her about caring.
 

I think of this Dr. Suess quote and my grandmother a lot of the times when I am waking up early on a Saturday morning to go work the RiverMobile, or walking my compost from Stuart hill to Kennedy Union (where the only compost bins are located on campus) in the freezing rain. It is a slow process trying to save the world but I refuse to lose hope. I care about my relationship with the planet and I’m not going to stop. I would clean 1000 more rivers, plant 1000 more trees. I don’t mind being the Lorax. If I am the Lorax other people will want to be too. And someday I know we all will be.

"Rabbit Hash, We’re Gonna Get Some Trash"

"Rabbit Hash, We’re Gonna Get Some Trash"

Joe Chandler, 2019 Cohort

Sophomore River Steward, Joe Chandler, recounts his experience volunteering with Living Lands and Waters, a nonprofit dedicated to cleaning America's rivers. This October, 12 River Stewards spent the night on the LLW Barge and volunteered at a river clean-up in Rabbit Hash, KY.

 

“Where’d they all go?”

We’re here… I think… We sit in the car wondering if we have in fact made it. We’re on what is basically a one lane road in between houses and the Ohio River, with no streetlights, and cars parked on either side of the road in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. Very confused on if we were where we were supposed to be; to meet the rest of our group and to meet our hosts for the night, we walk down the dark one lane road. At the end we see a group of people who look like they might be our group. It was indeed our group; we made it! We were introduced to one of the crew mates of Living Lands and Waters barge! After brief introductions and a run-down of our plan for the night we headed back to the car to get our gear and move the car to the parking lot near the General Store where we found our group. However, after parking the car, there was nobody around. Our group had vanished! Well, I got to thinking, and figured we are supposed to go to a barge, barges float on water, the Ohio River is right next to us, that seems like a good place to go looking for our group! As I walk towards where I think is a path to get to the river I look around and put my arms out to say “Where’d they go!?” I then see a man and a woman with headlamps and hear the familiar voice of Chad Pregracke. I can’t believe it, the founder of Living Lands and Waters is the first one I make acquaintances with; what an exciting moment! He led us down to the barge and in the mean time we had a short conversation. I did not know it as this point, but this introduction would turn into a good relationship the following day during our river cleanup.

 

That Night

After a tour of the barge and a run-down of what the next day had in store for us, we were free to hang out and relax. The Living Lands and Waters crew were so inviting and made us feel right at home. I grilled them with questions about how a few of them got started and about any opportunities there might be for me to possibly join the team, or at least volunteer during the spring. I felt like a kid again, asking tons of questions to learn about something I knew nothing about!

 

The Next Day

The next day, Saturday, consisted of a river cleanup. This was the main reason for our visit to Rabbit Hash, KY. I had no idea what was in store for us, but the crew told us we will pull trash out by the boat loads, we will get muddy, and our shoes will never look the same after today. That sounded pretty intimidating. How much trash can there be? Boat loads? Seriously!? … Seriously... There was fog on the river so we had to stay put until that cleared. The garbage barge needed to be sorted through. The shore near where the barge was docked also needed to be cleaned up, so we had things to do in the meantime. After volunteering for a team of three to dig out a truck bed liner that was buried on shore and pick up trash on the shore near the barge, I think Chad knew none of us were afraid of mud and we all wanted to get this area as clean as possible in the short amount of time we were there. After the fog cleared and we could safely travel down the river, we began to clean up the shore a couple of miles away from the barge. I could see from the river that there we garbage cans, 5-gallon buckets, bottles, trash bags, and plastic barrels among other various items that shouldn’t be on the shoreline of a river.

Growing up fishing on lakes and playing along streams myself, I always picked up trash that I saw wherever I was. I had no idea how dirty our rivers actually are. The rest of the day consisted of me going for the largest objects that were buried in the mud. I wanted to get the big things out because that’s what everybody can see from the water and that’s also what took the most work to get out. I teamed up with a few different people throughout the day to get these larger objects out, and frankly the whole team that was out there did an absolutely incredible job! It was amazing to see. Everybody just wanted to get as much trash as possible out of that area. But going back to me being drawn to the large objects, it seemed like Chad knew I could be called upon to help him pick up a plastic barrel full of mud if there was one. And there were many. We made a good team! I continued to grill him and the crew with questions about different work they do, their experiences, hobbies, etc. It was a great day doing some great things with some great people! I hope to volunteer with Living Lands and Waters more, not only throughout my time at UD but throughout my lifetime. It was a truly amazing experience that I will never forget!