My Project in Brief.What i believe.

Blog July 12th

It takes a village to raise a child , we all have heard this several times. But do we ever think what does it take to create a village ? In a village every grown up plays a valued role in education, health, welfare and development of a child.
As being in the field of Early Childhood Education for my part since the last few months I have been working on my project, based on the enrichment of children’s social and emotional development through outdoor play. After seeing children who are afraid of insects and animals, sitting on the grass, playing in the sand /mud, and getting dirty. I recognized the need to raise the awareness about the importance of these outdoor activities. Children have become more inclined towards playing computer games, video games , watching movies or engaging in sedentary activities rather than enjoying outdoors and observing nature. Due to various factors including both parents working , safety and security reasons, children spending maximum time in daycares, traffic, lack of parks and nature areas new constructions etc. Children have become alarmingly nature deficit. Next to a mother, Nature can be the best teacher. Children learn science, mathematics, social skills , develop emotional skills , learn to value life and even strt thinking about God and religion.
We can all agree that nature is incredibly therapeutic. Just like us adults, children do go through numerous stresses in their daily life. Keeping this in mind, I introduced my young students to outdoor activities. We started taking nature walks, rain or shine more often. We watched birds, looked for deer tracks, bugs,& worms, and touched snails in rain, played on tree stumps,looked for rabbits and squirrels.The Children enjoyed the outdoors and wanted to spend more time outdoors rather than indoors. They Forgot about movies and computer games. Inspired by their new interest in outdoor play, I designed the first portion of my pilot project to include children’s direct interaction with nature. What a better way to do this than planting a vegetable garden. We prepared the soil-bed and together, selected the vegetables we wanted to plant. As you can see children excitedly participated in this project. Every day they checked on the vegetable garden and together we watched the plants grow and bear vegetables. They loved picking chillies, bell pepper, and peas.
The second portion of my pilot project incorporated collaborative outdoor activities between adults and children. As we know it is impossible to raise a child in a village that does not involve the family of children. After the success of the gardening activity, I wanted adults to realize the numerous benefits associated with their children’s direct interaction with nature . To do this, I organized a potluck picnic in a nature park, inviting the children’s parents and grand parents. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed socializing with other parents and children as well as playing with their children while emersed in natural environment.. Children explored the park with the parents and were fascinated by the towering trees , ducks , the sound of the stream , and different animals. Both children and parents recalled the enjoyment they experienced outdoors in the nature park ,and also the joy being interacting with other parents and children. I felt as my efforts of bringing children and parents outdoors is accomplished when they all asked me to go for nature walks and picnics again.
Later I asked the children to express their experiences with nature through art. I was amazed to see the expressions I received in children’s art work. They told stories , draw pictures and also pretend played as animals. I believe through nature interaction children develop better problem solving, social, emotional and cognitive skills as they do in structured play areas and activities.. As Helle Nebelong ,Danish landscape architect mentions, “I am convinced that standardised play equipment is dangerous. When the distance between all the rungs on the climbing net or the ladder is exactly the same, the child has no need to concentrate on where he puts his feet. This lesson cannot be carried over into all the knobbly and asymmetrical forms with which one is confronted throughout life.” Nature Nurtures learning.
I got food for my thoughts from several wonderful articles and as well from the work of wonderful researchers who have worked hard for children’s benefit as well as from the teaching and guidance of my professors. I would like to mention few of the articles and books that helped me most in my project, “A Final report to the Forestry Commmision UK by Tim Gill about “Growing Adventure”, with whom I am in contact and plans to join him in his work for bringing children out in woods. As well as from Elizabeth Goodenough’s book , “A Place for Play”, And Richard Louv’s book ,Last Child in the Woods”.