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Excerpt from Last Child in the Woods

INTRODUCTION

One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew, then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, "Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?"

I asked what he meant.

"Well, you're always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp."

At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had, in fact, been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek, something I'd be hard-pressed to find a child doing these days. Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own childhood-and, I fear, too readily discount my children's experiences of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important.

He was right. Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact.

Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment-but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. That's exactly the opposite of how it was when I was a child.

As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths. I wandered those woods even in my dreams. A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest-but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move.

This book explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child-and adult-development.

While I pay particular attention to children, my focus is also on those Americans born during the past two to three decades. The shift in our relationship to the natural world is startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to nature. Not that long ago, summer camp was a place where you camped, hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight stories about ghosts or mountain lions. As likely as not today, "summer camp" is a weight-loss camp, or a computer camp. For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear-to ignore. A recent television ad depicts a four-wheel-drive SUV racing along a breathtakingly beautiful mountain stream-while in the backseat two children watch a movie on a flip-down video screen, oblivious to the landscape and water beyond the windows.

A century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier had ended. His thesis has been discussed and debated ever since. Today, a similar and more important line is being crossed.

Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom-while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Wellmeaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields. In the patent-or-perish environment of higher education, we see the death of natural history as the more hands-on disciplines, such as zoology, give way to more theoretical and remunerative microbiology and genetic engineering. Rapidly advancing technologies are blurring the lines between humans, other animals, and machines. The postmodern notion that reality is only a construct-that we are what we program-suggests limitless human possibilities; but as the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience.

Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature-in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.

Reducing that deficit-healing the broken bond between our young and nature-is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes-our daily lives. The following pages explore an alternative path to the future, including some of the most innovative environment-based school programs; a reimagining and redesign of the urban environment-what one theorist calls the coming "zoopolis"; ways of addressing the challenges besetting environmental groups; and ways that faith-based organizations can help reclaim nature as part of the spiritual development of children. Parents, children, grandparents, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, environmentalists, and researchers from across the nation speak in these pages. They recognize the transformation that is occurring. Some of them paint another future, in which children and nature are reunited-and the natural world is more deeply valued and protected.

During the research for this book, I was encouraged to find that many people now of college age-those who belong to the first generation to grow up in a largely de-natured environment-have tasted just enough nature to intuitively understand what they have missed. This yearning is a source of power. These young people resist the rapid slide from the real to the virtual, from the mountains to the Matrix. They do not intend to be the last children in the woods.

My sons may yet experience what author Bill McKibben has called "the end of nature," the final sadness of a world where there is no escaping man. But there is another possibility: not the end of nature, but the rebirth of wonder and even joy. Jackson's obituary for the American frontier was only partly accurate: one frontier did disappear, but a second one followed, in which Americans romanticized, exploited, protected, and destroyed nature. Now that frontier-which existed in the family farm, the woods at the end of the road, the national parks, and in our hearts-is itself disappearing or changing beyond recognition.

But, as before, one relationship with nature can evolve into another. This book is about the end of that earlier time, but it is also about a new frontier-a better way to live with nature.

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Last Child in the Woods - Excerpt - Richard Louv

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Excerpt from Last Child in the Woods One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew, then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, "Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?" I asked what he meant.

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map, pictures, info about Stonewall Jackson Elem.

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The Stonewall Garden is approximately 20,000 square feet and includes student crops (one plant for each of the 600+ children at the school) in two growing seasons, a wildscape, greenhouse, chicken coop housing a handful of hens hatched in Stonewall classrooms, and a small pond. This map shows you where to find these elements.

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6 types of writing re: gardens/ outdoor learning spaces

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Crockett's Classroom Forever in Third Grade

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Time to get outside and enjoy the beautiful spring weather! Spring also means it's time for last minute test prepping! Well, I have a fun way to review six different writing genres with your students.
In this engaging project students write six different papers, each about a garden, but each is also a different genre. Sticking with one theme, but changing genres, will give students a better idea about the differences between writing genres. Here are the genres and topics:

(Click on this image to see the packet in Crockett's Classroom on TPT)

The packet also includes an idea for an inside garden, six writing guidelines, six graphic organizers and six different publishing papers. You can have the students put all the finished papers together into a booklet. Two different covers and an About the Author page is also included. This makes a great project for end of the year conferences or open houses.
The best news is you can download and try the persuasive writing piece for free! Click on either of these images to give it a try in your classroom.

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Time to get outside and enjoy the beautiful spring weather! Spring also means it's time for last minute test prepping! Well, I have a fun way to review six different writing genres with your students. In this engaging project students write six different papers, each about a garden, but each is also a different genre.

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with links to outdoor math ideas

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Are your kids excited each day to do math? Maybe they love math. If so, that's great! If not, I want to encourage you to find ways to make it less painful and maybe even a little bit fun. If you have a reluctant math learner, there are things you can do to help and support them. One of my favorite ways to get kids more involved and excited about learning math is to take it outside. There are so many benefits of taking math outside that I hope you will try to make it a normal part of your routine, whether you are a teacher, parent or homeschooler!

6 Benefits of Taking Math Outside:

1. The fresh air and sun is good for their health.

Being outside can increase the levels of serotonin and dopamine in the brain, helping your kids be happier and less stressed. In addition, getting out for a walk or hands on math activity can provide exercise and a chance to get up and move.

Read more: Improving Your Child's Mental Health Through Easy Everyday Activities.

2. A change of scenery can be motivating.

Sometimes just a change from the normal, everyday can be exciting and fun for kids. A 2008 study of Kindergarteners found "a significant amount" showed enhanced enthusiasm about learning by taking it outside. In addition, I personally saw greater engagement and participation from high school seniors when we worked outside.

3. Kids can learn outdoor skills at the same time.

Incorporating math learning into outdoor skills can help kids learn math and life skills at the same time. Gardening or using a compass, for example, can be a means of exploring math in the real world.

4. Kids can look for patterns and shapes.

Our world is made up of mathematical structures, whether it is in nature or the buildings around us. Going outside gives kids a chance to see patterns (such as Fibonacci numbers or fractals) in nature, as well as all kinds of shapes that make up our world.

5. It can help them retain more.

By working on math in a context or within a particular experience, kids are more likely to remember what they learn and practice. Creating fun memories can help kids build a foundation on which to build later learning.

6. It's an opportunity to see and use math in real life.

Making math relevant is an incredibly important component of math education. If kids don't see how and why it is necessary, they will not be as motivated to learn and succeed. Going outside and exploring math problems in real life can help make math meaningful. Using measurement and estimation skills, for instance, is one way kids can apply what they're learning to the real world.

Steve Humble, regional coordinator for NCETM, is a proponent of learning math outside of the classroom and states, "I like the idea of young people gaining 'mathematical eyes."

Being outside helps kids develop mathematical eyes, and see all the ways that math is around us.

Read More: The Value of Outdoor Learning: Evidence From Research in the UK and Elsewhere.

It's also important to note that while my focus is on the benefits of taking math outside, many of these are really benefits of taking any kind of learning outside. 🙂

Photo Credit: Kazz.0 via Compfight cc {text added}

Fun Ideas for Taking Math Outside:
These are just a handful of ideas, but hopefully it gives you some places to start!
What would you add? What would you say are the benefits of taking math outside? What other fun ideas do you have?

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6 Little Known Benefits of Taking Math Outside

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Are your kids excited each day to do math? Maybe they love math. If so, that's great! If not, I want to encourage you to find ways to make it less painful and maybe even a little bit fun. If you have a reluctant math learner, there are things you can do to help and support them.