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Another way to counter the problem of childhood obesity is by encouraging kids to get outdoors and moving.
It’s not uncommon for the average American youth to spend up to 90% of waking hours indoors – and to spend much of that plugged in to computers, video games, smartphones, TV and other electronic gadgets. Not only does this take a toll on their health, but it ensures their disconnect from the natural world – a state that, most agree, is prerequisite for the kind of apathetic stewardship that has brought our world to the ecological brink. Time spent connecting with nature also gives kids opportunities to become more self-aware and mindful – key to developing self-regulation, empathy and other prosocial skills.
We connect to nature through our feeling states. When using Yoga Calm teachings, children can begin to recognize the effects that natural environments have on their bodies and minds.
Each element – earth, air, fire and water – has characteristics that correspond to certain feelings in the body. This understanding is expressed in our language about people, such as when we describe one person as airy or lighthearted and another as earthy or grounded. Kids can learn to develop and strengthen feeling states through activities and connection with the elements. For instance, trudging through a muddy mountain trail with a pack on gives a feeling of being grounded, while flying a kite gives a feeling of freedom and flight. By understanding, exploring and expressing these feelings, students can begin to develop a deeper relationship with nature, and they can begin to notice that nature can help teach us to be more grounded, free or fluid.
A great place to begin building a relationship with the natural world is through activities that open the senses and build trust, like observations or silent walking in nature. Once the foundation is laid, activities that encourage belonging and stewardship become both more practicable and powerful.
Good observation requires the ability to be still, patient and curious. The activities below can be used to help children develop these skills. Particularly important are times for the students to get outside and connect to the nature that is available to them. Street trees, vacant lots and school playgrounds all provide opportunities for kids to develop a sense of stewardship to the land where they live and play, as well as provide education about their native plants and habitat. Just make sure you scout these areas first for any hazards.
Following each activity or experiment, you can give the students time to journal about their experiences. They can record what happened (the original meaning of “journal”), their feelings about the experience, their thoughts or anything else they would like to explore and record. Some may choose to write a poem or draw a picture. Some may decide to write a list of things they can do to help the environment. You can offer specific ideas for journaling or you can leave it open-ended.
3 Earth Activities
- Outdoor Observation (Silent Walking)
For this activity, have the children walk silently in nearby nature, observing and using multiple senses – looking, listening, smelling, touching. The intention is for them to wander at a fairly slow pace and find a “special” spot or place they can begin to “bond” or connect with. They learn to observe the Earth in particular – to feel or smell the soil in different areas, for instance, or touch different trees or plants, or just close their eyes and listen to the tree branches rustling in the wind. It’s important to give them a time limit, though, and to specify appropriate areas and boundaries. They should be close enough to hear your cue for them to return. - Sensory Walk/Trust Walk
In this activity, children guide each other to various natural objects. Those who are being guided have their eyes closed or covered by a cloth or bandana, which lets them experience the natural objects with non-visual senses such as feeling and smelling. This activity is most effective when done outside, where students have a chance to discover natural objects in a natural setting. If weather isn’t permitting, though, natural objects collected ahead of time can be placed around a room. Be sure to set ground rules about which objects are appropriate to touch and pick up and which ones are not. It’s also probably best to rule out the sense of taste as an option and to discuss the reasons with the group. (A classroom version of this activity is in our book, Yoga Calm for Children.) - Nature Gallery
Let the kids designate a specific place in the room (e.g., a shelf or table) where chosen natural objects can be placed at any point throughout the sessions. These can be objects discovered during walks or objects they bring from their homes and neighborhoods. Eventually, the space becomes the children’s own beautiful nature gallery, helping to cultivate a connection to nature – particularly nearby nature. This also helps give students a sense of place, which can become a springboard for stewardship of the local environment. The nature gallery can also be used for science lessons.
Be sure to check back for our next post, which will have even more activities to get kids moving and connecting with the natural world!
Adapted from the e-book Creating a Sustainable Future: Yoga Calm Environmental Education Curriculum Guide, available for download soon through the Yoga Calm Store.
Images by Jos van Wunnik and lori05871, via Flickr
Learn more about how Yoga Calm and environmental education activities can be used together to foster meaningful connections between personal and planetary health, a lifelong interest in science and increased environmental citizenry and stewardship. Join us for the next session of our Creating a Sustainable Future workshop, September 24 – 25 at Still Moving Yoga in Portland, Oregon.
The average American child now spends over 8 hours in front of a screen each day. She emails, texts, and updates her status incessantly. He can name hundreds of corporate logos, but less than ten native plants. She aspires to have hundreds of online friends, most she may never meet in person. He masters complicated situations presented in game after game, but often avoids simple person-to-person conversation. They are almost entirely out of contact with the world that, over millions of years of evolution, shaped human beings — the natural world.
Play Again is a remarkable documentary on the impact of our screen-dominated culture on kids and their relationship to the natural world. In it, filmmakers follow 6 teenagers as they unplug and embark on “a wilderness adventure – no electricity, no cell phone coverage, no virtual reality.” Balanced by expert commentary from the likes of sociologist Juliet Schor, environmental writer Bill McKibben and others, the film “investigates the consequences of a childhood removed from nature and encourages action for a sustainable future.”
As we mentioned in our previous post about this film, Yoga Calm is committed to providing tools and resources to counter trends like those in the opening quote above – including, this year, our first ever Yoga Calm Summer Camp. One of our newest Certified Instructors, Dr. Nadia Delshad, was at Still Moving Yoga here in Portland, Oregon, for our inaugural camp and recently sent us her reflections on the experience:
The Beauty of Yoga Calm Summer Camp
With smiling hearts, new friendships and beautiful memories created, 13 children said goodbye to one another after spending a very special week at Yoga Calm Summer Camp. Together, they had developed wellness habits, environmental awareness, social skills and creative expression amongst the idyllic strawberry-lined paths, lush trees and gardens of Lynea and Jim Gillen’s tranquil studios in Southwest Portland.
In addition to her many years of counseling and yoga practice, Lynea also has had substantial experience in facilitating summer art camps. Tapping into this for Yoga Calm Summer Camp, she created – in her wonderfully unique style – a peaceful, creative and meaningful experience for both children and staff. Richly significant connections between personal and planetary health were fostered, and creative ways of continuing to respect this relationship, encouraged.
Lynea’s and Leah Schuyler’s good work in both developing this comprehensive environmental education program (Leah has a degree in Ecopsychology) and leading the sessions was complemented by that of Lynea’s husband Jim, a former environmental educator with the National Science Foundation who also created and tends to the beautiful gardens that served as setting for the camp.
If we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, then let us allow them to love the earth before we ask them to save it. Perhaps this is what Thoreau had in mind when he said, “the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think the same is true of human beings.” – David Sobel, Beyond Ecophobia
I was privileged to share this week with wonderful young human beings and observe how each day the children became physically and emotionally stronger, kinder to one another, more connected to their environment and more empowered through a deeper knowledge of nature’s wonders. Consistently, I thought of how strongly I wanted every person on this planet – children and adults alike – to be able to have this same experience, which I will certainly treasure for a lifetime. For as the mother of two toddler boys, I often wonder at the environment they will find themselves in through their journey into adulthood. I deeply hope that we, collectively, are able to preserve the beautiful blessings of nature that we have been so fortunate to have inherited. Nature has given us so much – provides us with so many gifts. I want us to pass these blessings on to following generations. We eat and breathe and drink only because of nature. We are all a part of nature, and teaching our children gratitude will ensure our survival on this planet.
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity…. – Gretel Ehrlich
At the end of camp week, the children shared how they had enjoyed creating their personal bonding experience on the land and connecting to that special place for quiet reflection each day. They had fun picking berries and planting herbs. They loved learning to drum and challenged themselves in yoga poses and sequences. One young boy said that he loved “everything” about yoga camp – that it was the best camp he had ever been to.
It was certainly the best camp I had ever been to!
Thank you to all those good human beings who were involved in making this wonderful week possible, and may many children be as fortunate to experience this beauty in their lives and hearts in the future.
Man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; [the Lakota] knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. – Luther Standing Bear
Just as a child has that magical capacity to move among the earth, I am reminded that if we allow ourselves as adults we too can “see the land as an animal does; experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.” – Valerie Andrews, A Passion for this Earth
Nadia Delshad, PsyD, is a Certified Yoga Calm Instructor, clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist who has worked with children and families for over 17 years. She has an MS in developmental child psychology and a PsyD in clinical psychology. She is currently teaching Yoga Calm and social-emotional skills training to children from preschool through 5th Grade with a family coaching method component for parents. You can find her at Young Yogis on Facebook.
“Serendipity” – the idea of the happy or fortuitous accident – is a wonderful word, inspired by a Persian fairy tale in which three princes from Serendip (the old name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka) who “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” It’s also a wonderful concept, sometimes bound up with the notion of synchronicity, or simultaneous events that seem to be meaningfully connected.
Both terms came to mind the other day when we received information about a new documentary coming here to Portland that taps into some of our ongoing concerns about children’s health and well-being and new tools we’ve created to address them.
Play Again explores the impact of our screen-dominated culture on kids and their relationship to the natural world. Media overload is an issue we’ve covered here before – one which the film’s synopsis describes powerfully:
The average American child now spends over 8 hours in front of a screen each day. She emails, texts, and updates her status incessantly. He can name hundreds of corporate logos, but less than ten native plants. She aspires to have hundreds of online friends, most she may never meet in person. He masters complicated situations presented in game after game, but often avoids simple person-to-person conversation. They are almost entirely out of contact with the world that, over millions of years of evolution, shaped human beings — the natural world.
The long-term consequences of this experiment on human development remain to be seen, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. By most accounts, this generation will face multiple crises — environmental, economic and social. Will this screen world — and its bevy of virtual experiences — have adequately prepared these “digital natives” to address the problems they’ll face, problems on whose resolution their own survival may depend?
In their quest to find out, the filmmakers followed 6 teenagers leading screen-dominated lives as they unplug and embark on “a wilderness adventure – no electricity, no cell phone coverage, no virtual reality.” Balanced by expert commentary from the likes of sociologist Juliet Schor, environmental writer Bill McKibben and others, the film “investigates the consequences of a childhood removed from nature and encourages action for a sustainable future.”
The consequences are exactly why we strive to develop even more tools and resources to help you help children reconnect with nature. For instance, there’s our Sustainable Future workshop – which shows how Yoga Calm and environmental education activities can be integrated to develop high-interest, interdisciplinary lessons that meet and support K-8 health, science and physical education standards and curricula. Through exploring techniques of physical yoga, observation, self-reflection, social/emotional skills development, storytelling and simple schoolyard explorations, participants learn how to cultivate children’s innate curiosity and appreciation of their bodies, each other, animal life and other aspects of their natural, daily environment.
What’s more, children can experience these activities for themselves at a Yoga Calm Summer Camp – a new program we’re rolling out this summer. Combining yoga, environmental education, music and social skills games over the course of a week, the camp gives kids the opportunity to sink into the experience and have time to dream and explore nature while learning wellness habits and essential personal and social skills — learning to live and work together in a peaceful, mindful way. The first of this year’s camps are listed on our Kids’ Workshop Schedule. (Certified Yoga Calm Instructors can host these camps, as well. Contact our business office for further information.)
Last, our new Yoga Calm Environmental Education Handbook will be out soon, demonstrating ways of adapting the Yoga Calm for Children curriculum to teach children about the natural world and help them get in touch with natural environments. We’ll have more news about this and our other new titles as we get closer to their publication dates.
Play Again will be shown on Saturday, June 11 at Lewis & Clark College here in Portland. Details are available on the film’s website, along with info about other upcoming screenings around the country and how to host a screening in your own geographic area.
Meantime, if you want to learn more about children’s relationship to the natural environment and how Yoga Calm can help facilitate a better, more meaningful relationship, do read our earlier post, “Healthy Children = Healthy Planet, or ‘No Child Left Inside.’”.
What are some of your favorite ways of helping kids get outside and reconnecting with nature? Let us know in the comments!
