Benefits of Nature-Based Early Childhood Education

These students at the Chicago Botanic Gardens Nature Preschool are learning their numbers and their letters like in any early childhood education program. But by spending a good portion of their time outside every day, they are also growing healthy and confident in using their minds and their bodies to explore the world around them, play, inquiry, and collaboration. I'm Emilian Gatesy. I'm the director of the North American Association for Environmental Education's early childhood initiative, Natural Start. Our mission is to support those educators, parents, and others who help young children connect with nature and care for the environment. And one of the ways in which we do that is by publishing and supporting research on the benefits and outcomes of nature-based early learning. What we're finding in this growing literature supports what educators have been observing for years with their students, that nature-based early learning has benefits to the individual child, such as increased excitement for learning and improved social skills, while laying the foundation for becoming more environmentally responsible adults. Nature provides an ideal context for developmentally appropriate learning across all domains. And nature play opportunities allow children to solve problems, be curious, and play creatively. This is because nature provides ever-changing textures, colors, forms, and loose parts to engage students' senses and help them encounter endless ways to play, explore, and be inquisitive about the world around them. For example, a simple stick may be a paintbrush, or it may be a magic wand, or it may be a sword, or anything else that the children can imagine. Using nature as the context for learning in early childhood has been shown to improve students' knowledge retention and stem habits of mind, such as questioning, testing hypotheses, understanding cause and effect, experimenting, and evaluating predictions. There's also increasing evidence that outdoor environments with more natural features, like trees and shrubs, lead to higher physical activity levels and better balance and coordination. Learning outside also seems to help with socialization, with teachers reporting more collaborative language and more cooperative activities among their students outside than inside. Teachers also report that spending time in a more natural environment helps children become more confident and willing to take healthy risks, like climbing trees or building with logs, for example. And the benefits of learning outside also transfer to the indoor classroom, with teachers in several studies reporting that their students were calmer and more engaged with the classroom materials following time spent outside in nature. And what is interesting is that the literature shows that these benefits accrue even without extensive outdoor access or travel to off-site locations. As long as students' engagement with nature inside the classroom and outside of it is meaningful and regular. So our task as educators, administrators, parents, and others with a stake in young children's education is to find more opportunities to integrate joyful moments of nature-based play and wonder in their education. This results in healthy children, lifelong learners, and good decision-makers for the future.