Effects of interactive outdoor education on understanding ecological principles and human connection to nature in elementary school children:

Last child in the woods, a book written by Richard Louv  in 2006, is about youth loosing touch with the natural world as they are pre-occuppied with the modern world.

For those of us who played outdoors as kids, our positive experience of roaming natural areas gives us a forever connection to nature. But if kids to day are not emerging themselves in the outdoors… where will their connection form?

If you don’t know nature, how can you care about it?

I wanted to do an environmental education project to support the idea that hands on outdoor ecology and science education allows children to better understand, appreciate and care about nature.

With guidance from my mentor and the elementary school teachers, I designed a series of eight hands on ecology lessons for 1st and 2nd grade students. After presenting an informational power point lesson to the students, I asked them to answer a series of questions about the material. I repeated the lesson outdoors and asked the same questions to the students again.

Students always had a better understanding of the material after the hands on outdoor activity.

After all lessons were taught, students reflected on the knowledge they had gained during out time together.

I was impressed in reading what students took away from the lessons. For example one student reflected on what she learned about humans and our connection to nature stating, “Worms eat dead things and put nutrients into the soil and plants need nutrients to grow and we (humans) need plants for air, food and water.