I am reading The Nature Principle, Richard Louv's new book. Something that has stayed with me is this sentence. "At the University of Michigan, researchers demonstrated the participants' memory performance, and attention spans improved by 20 percent after just an hour of interacting with nature, according to results published in Psychological Journal in 2008."
We spend an hour a day in nature at the Inside Outside School every afternoon, and uncounted hours outside for gardening class, recreation hour, lunch, some outside math classes, and apothecary as well as free time after lunch. This chapter also states that schools with greened grounds experience reduced absenteeism, something I can attest to. He is preaching to the choir, but I am loving this book even more than Last Child in the Woods. More and more I believe in what we are doing with renewed conviction. Tom put together our outside classroom benches today on the hillside. Special learning areas are being tucked away here and there. Green is beautiful.
We spend an hour a day in nature at the Inside Outside School every afternoon, and uncounted hours outside for gardening class, recreation hour, lunch, some outside math classes, and apothecary as well as free time after lunch. This chapter also states that schools with greened grounds experience reduced absenteeism, something I can attest to. He is preaching to the choir, but I am loving this book even more than Last Child in the Woods. More and more I believe in what we are doing with renewed conviction. Tom put together our outside classroom benches today on the hillside. Special learning areas are being tucked away here and there. Green is beautiful.
RSS Feed