Member-only story
Getting nature back into learning
There’s still wonder out there. Let’s share it.
It started, as so many wonderful things do, with a mistake. We hadn’t booked the school trip in time. My year partner and I tried other museums and attractions for our classes of nine and 10-year-olds, everything we could think of, but nothing was available, everything was fully booked; we’d left it too late.
What could we do? Our school insisted that we take one school trip per term.
“We could just take them to the woods,” I suggested, uncertainly.
“Woods? What woods?” asked my colleague.
She had a point. Our school was in an area of inner London not known for its access to nature. The school playground was almost entirely concrete. Sometimes I’d see a boy or a girl using a pencil to gently dig at the single square foot of dusty soil at the base of one of the playground’s few trees, searching for bugs. Usually, they didn’t encounter much. On one occasion, they were very excited to find a single woodlouse.
At home, many of the children were similarly nature-starved. Only a few of them had access to any private outdoor space and most of those had to contend with a backyard that was paved over or covered in artificial grass.
