Enjoying and exploring nature has always been a wondrous and exciting part of childhood and early-childhood education. Just take a walk outdoors with children and see how much they care about the world around them. They're curious. They ask questions. They learn by looking and listening.

Because of the concern in our society today about scarce resources, it's become increasingly important that we start early with young children and build on their natural "caring about" the environment to help them develop a "caring for" it.

What's Appropriate for Young Children

One challenge in this work is that caring for the environment has to do with concepts like scarcity, recycling, and conservation. Because those are abstract concepts, they are hard for children to understand. Children know best what they can see and touch. And to many of them, it may seem that there's so much of everything around. We also don't believe it's helpful to make young children worry about environmental problems or to make them feel they are responsible for solving those problems. It's enough to help children understand more about their world and to encourage them, very early in their lives, to care for the people and things in it.

Appreciating Our Environment

We heard about a child care provider who set a plant on the table to water it and saw a spider crawling out from the soil. The children watched a bit, and then the teacher carefully let the spider crawl onto a piece of paper and put it back in the dirt, saying, "Spiders are important bugs. I'll try to find a book about them for you."

Our attitudes are contagious -- and not only through our words. Children watch adults carefully to get clues about anything, including nature. Think about how much you "say" through your facial expressions, your voice, and your body when you see bugs, flowers, stones, etc.

Here are Some Ways to Help Children Appreciate Nature:

• Take a walk and notice what captures their attention
• Give children time to look out the window at a snowfall or to look at flowers in a vase
• Let the children help change the water in the aquarium or water the plants
• Encourage children to look for signs of spring
• Involve the children in burying a dead bird found in the yard, or a dead fish, or other classroom pet

You Can also Help Children Learn about Conserving our Planet's Resources with Activities like These:

• Assign a child to turn off the lights in the room when the class goes outside
• Take a field trip to a recycling plant
• When washing hands, wet them, then turn off the water while soaping them
• When brushing teeth, turn off the water during brushing
• When washing paint brushes, collect water and suds in a coffee can, instead of holding the brushes under running water for a long period of time

For more information about children and the environment by Fred Rogers, please visit our Family Communications web site.

Back to Theme