Forestry and Early Childhood

1. Forestry and Early Childhood

2. Because exploring nature is a complete sensory experience, early experiences with the natural world excite children’s imaginations and foster their inborn sense of wonder and curiosity, which are important motivators for lifelong learning.

3. Facilitating Experiences for Early Childhood Learners • Focus activities on things they can see and touch. Children are not yet able to deal with abstract concepts, such as time, measurement, quantity, speed, or cause-and-effect relationships. • Facilitate their active learning. Children learn by interacting, moving, playing, smelling, and taking things apart. • Focus on the experience, not on the information. Children need to handle objects, make their own observations, and draw their own conclusions. It's okay if they come to the "wrong" conclusions. Young children won't remember many of the facts and details, but they will remember what they did and how they felt while they were doing it. • Be attentive to their immediate physical needs. Children are not going to be patient or attentive if they are tired, hungry, cold, or in need of a bathroom break. • Accommodate their big egos. Children think everyone feels, thinks, and acts as they do. They are still learning how to share toys and tools, stand in lines, and wait. Be sure that you have enough materials for each child. Choose experiments and projects that produce quick results. • Give them choices. Children learn best when they can decide for themselves what, when, and how to do things. Provide choice time during the day. • Share experiences. Gather together in a circle and encourage children to talk about what they have experienced. Circle time provides opportunities for more discussion. • Limit your instructions to two or three steps. Children can remember only a few things at one time. Apply this same principle to rules. • Provide a safe, unbreakable environment. Check for sharp edges, breakable containers, and small parts. You will stifle learning and fun if you find yourself saying, "Be careful" or "Don't touch that!" From Project Learning Tree’s Environmental Experiences for Early Childhood

4. All children will benefit and learn from nature experiences if you: • Allow children to touch the physical objects. • Provide a variety of books, pictures, and recordings, such as birdcalls and nature sounds. • Call on all the senses when observing nature. • Embrace the knowledge you have. You know more than you think you do. You know more than enough to explore and discover nature in your neighborhood. • Model research skills. When you discover something unfamiliar, say, "I don't know. Can we answer that question by ourselves or do we need a book?" Find the answers together. • Know your own comfort level. If you are nervous about things found in nature, such as spiders, then don't teach about spiders. The children will sense your feelings. • Participate with the children. Be a scientist and record your own observations. Be an artist and sketch along with them. • Go with the flow. If maple seeds are falling from the trees today, forget your plan and play with the seeds! • Model care and respect for the natural environment. Touch plants and animals gently. Return animals to the places you found them. Carefully replace logs and stones. • Rediscover your own sense of wonder. Share your favorite parts of nature and your favorite nature books with the children. Your enthusiasm will spread. • Have fun!!!! "If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he (she) needs the companionship of at least one adult who, can share it, rediscovering with him (her) the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in." Rachel Carson, A Sense of Wonder

5. Applying Effective Practices • Begin with simple outdoor experiences and expand from there. Start by exploring right outside the classroom using simple equipment familiar to children. It can be something as simple as giving each child a magnifying glass and looking at all the things next to an outside wall. • Experience nature in many ways. Offer opportunities for dramatic and creative expression through music, art, and literature. Encourage children to use their imaginations. • Ensure that nature is accessible to all children. Adapt activities so that children with special needs can experience nature too. • Support the children in their adventures. Children might be uncomfortable outside the classroom. Make the transition slowly. Reassure children who express fear. • Allow for individual differences. Children already have their own ideas about nature and living things, ideas that are based on their experiences, their cultures, and their developmental level's. A child from a home with interesting pets, houseplants, a big backyard, and caregivers who are familiar with nature will react and learn very differently from a child raised in a home where wild animals and overgrown places are viewed with fear or aversion. • Remember that the process is much more important than the product. This philosophy is just as central outside as it is inside.

6. Learning About Forests & Trees Most early childhood learners understand the following conceptsabout forests and trees: • There are different types of trees. • Trees and leaves have different shapes, sizes and colors. • Trees have different parts and the parts perform different functions. • Trees and tree parts have different texture and scents. • People use different parts of a tree for everyday products. • Trees change through the seasons. • Animals build their homes in and on trees, find food on trees, and hide in trees. Trees function as all or a part of a habitat for animals and plants. • Trees and other plants and animals depend on each other. • A forest is an area of land covered with trees and other plants. • Many different plants and animals live in a forest. • If you remember that early childhood learners must see, touch, or hold something in order to construct meaning from it, then you will understand that the following concepts about forests and trees are too abstract for most preschoolers: • Trees have unique characteristics that allow them to be identified and classified into family relationships. • Trees progress through a life cycle. This process can take several hundred years for some species of trees. • The parts of a tree perform specific invisible functions (e.g., making food, moving water and food up and down the trunk, exchanging gases, and absorbing minerals). • Chlorophyll in leaves produces food for trees through a process known as photosynthesis. • Daylight and temperature playa role in seasonal changes. • Forests are not static. They change over time in a process called succession.

7. Exploring Nature with Five Senses Sight: Observe shapes in natural and built environments. Use the shape of leaves, tree silhouettes and bird silhouettes. Sounds: Listen to natural sounds made by living and nonliving things. Imitate the sounds heard. Depending on the area, you might hear traffic, people, birds, the wind, etc. Touch: Explore natural objects through touch. Put together “mystery boxes” by cutting holes in shoeboxes large enough to fit a small hand. Put different objects in the boxes (e.g. bark, cones, needles, nuts, seeds). Smell: Smell different tree parts. Have a selection of trees that are aromatic. Any part of the Sassafras tree, spice bush and cinnamon will work. Sweet birch’s inner bark smells of wintergreen. Taste: Taste tree fruits. Have a sample of different tree fruits on hand. Try for oranges (sweet), lemons (sour), cinnamon cookies (savory), etc. Nature and natural objects stimulate eyes, noses, ears, tongues, and fingers to facilitate meaningful learning.

8. Experiencing Trees Through the Seasons Fall: Observe seasonal changes in nature, especially fall leaves. Collect, sort, classify, and count fall leaves and seeds. Bring in different colored fall leaves and have children make pictures using them. Winter: Evergreen trees offer a sensory overload. Compare the cones, needles and twigs of different evergreen trees. Do they smell different? Make treats for animals wildlife to help them through the winter by “painting” pinecones with peanut butter and rolling in birdseed. Spring: Help children explore twigs, buds, and tree flowers while they celebrate the coming of spring. Bring in samples of each. Put a stethoscope up to the trunk of a tree to listen to the sap run. Summer: Adopt a tree. Make bark and leaf rubbings of their favorite trees. Make up a story about their favorite tree. Have a picnic under a tree. Discuss why it is cooler in the shade and what other things we get from trees.

9. Meeting Neighborhood Trees Parts of a Tree: Compare human body parts to tree parts. Have children make a tree costume out of paper bags and explore the parts of a tree. Discuss how trees are like people and how they are different. Like a Tree: Let children pretend they are a seed and grow into a tree. Have them act out growing bigger and taller, stretching their roots and branches out. Take a neighborhood walk. Trees as Habitats: From their leafy branches to their tangled roots, trees provide habitats for plants and animals. Observe signs of animals eating, sleeping and hiding in trees. Look for scratch marks on the bark, animal scat, leaves that have been eaten, tracks, etc. Products from Trees: Collect and display tree products. Examples of wood, food and paper products are good for this age group. Other good things are clean air, places to climb, shade.

10. Conclusion • This age group likes to play. Make it fun. • Project Learning Tree and Project WILD both have activity books for early childhood. You must attend a workshop to get the materials but it’s worth it. • Use books and music. If you don’t have anything appropriate at home, check out the library. Children this age love to be read to and really enjoy music and songs. • Let your inner child out. Get ready to play with them. • Get down to their level.