Showing posts with label schoolgrounds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label schoolgrounds. Show all posts

Thursday, September 8, 2011

The nature-rich school yard

Premier Christy Clark has just announced $8 million for upgrading school playgrounds -- wouldn't it be wonderful if "upgrades" meant not more plastic climbing things and swinging things, but a wider vision of what the grounds for children's play could involve? What if schools were to sponsor nature-based play? That would mean playing in meadows and woods, among bird feeders, tiny fish ponds and low labyrinths created by interesting varied shrubs. What if schools used their grounds not just for recess and sports (and for standing about shivering until it's time to go back in, which anyone has seen who has ever done playground supervision in schools), but for displaying urban/suburban plants, animals, and micro-ecosystems? For tracking and counting migrating and local birds and nests? For creating monarch butterfly waystations to help those beleaguered beings not go extinct? For planting new groves of trees and noticing what wildlife they attract -- the squirrels and blue jays that bury the acorns, the hawks that watch for baby squirrels, the lichen that creep along the branches, the insects that hide in the lichen? The wildflowers that grow in a long-grass mini-meadow, and the specimens students could find to look at under microscopes in the classroom. Think of what they could learn from outdoor thermometers and sundials, and from going out with collecting jars, sketching equipment and notebooks?

Some schools possess nothing but a playing field and blank flat concrete surrounded with a chainlink fence. As housing densifies and new parks fail to be created by municipalities, school yards become an ever-more significant portion of total urban green space. They should not be wasted by being black-topped. Much recent research also tells us (see Child and Nature Alliance: www.childnature.ca) that time spent in natural settings makes children more relaxed, focussed, refreshed for classroom learning. No urban space is a completely "natural" setting, but schools could do a lot better in becoming oases of green space in a too-concrete, too-artificial and indoor world. The Evergreen Foundation (www.evergreen.ca) has a "School Ground Greening" section which offers lots of tips and even funding to individual schools.

The BC Teachers Federation has pronounced the premier's focus on playgrounds "myopic," but in fact it could be the start of something big, something transformative both to landscapes and to kids' recreational lives, if only they could shift the emphasize from monkey bars to the benefits of nature-play.

B. Julian
(B. Julian is author of Childhood Pastorale: Children, Nature, and the Preservation of Landscape, available from local bookstores and libraries)