By Mitchel Resnick | In recent years, a growing number of educators and psychologists have expressed concern that computers are stifling children’s learning and creativity, engaging children in mindless interaction and passive consumption. They have a point: today, many computers are used in that way. But that needn’t be the case.
By Theo Klimstra | One of the striking differences between the Netherlands and most countries is the vast number of bikes that you’ll see everywhere. In the Netherlands, everybody rides bikes, partly because they are cheap to buy and cheap to maintain for commuting (no gas required) and partly because Dutch employers team up with the tax service to allow employees to get a full refund on their new bike. Furthermore, parents bring their children (yes, multiple children, sometimes as many as four or five on a single bike!) to school or daycare; others bring TVs and small pieces of furniture home on bikes while dodging wandering tourists in the busy streets of Amsterdam, and if you visit The Hague, you might see the prime minister himself biking to work. Even taking your rusty old bike to a job interview is considered completely normal. All this is to say that, in the Netherlands, riding a bike is not just something that kids do; it is something almost everyone does – making the Netherlands a true biking culture. Why is this so? And was it always like this?
By Jane Hirschi | Years ago, I spent an afternoon with a group of eighth-grade boys digging up potatoes. They were amazed to find potatoes growing underground and surprised by their almost peppery flavor when we cooked and ate them. More recently, I witnessed a third grader who often struggled when asked to speak about lessons carried out in the classroom but who could speak with authority about the decomposition process in the school’s garden compost bin. And even more recently a seventh grader showed off her impressive knowledge of flowers – knowledge stemming (pun intended) from her active participation in school gardening and from drawing flowers in her art classes and searching on the internet for flowers she had never seen. These and countless other stories have taught me the power of school gardens for connecting students to nature and for supporting their learning. This power is all the more impressive when school gardens are in the city.
Video: Banded Brothers | Series 1 Episode 1 | BBC Featured image by Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Editors note:… Read More »Video: This Warthog took a trip to the Mongoose Spa
By Robin Huntley and David Sobel | Start a conversation about using the natural environment, or taking learning outside, or studying the bobolinks in the meadow, and ticks start crawling through the recesses of school administrators’ and parents’ minds. Ticks and their associated diseases are perceived as a scourge across the northeastern United States, and rightfully so. Lyme disease is no laughing matter. This article describes how a surging tick population on the grounds of a rural Maine school inspired a class of third-graders to engage in a study of ticks, their habitat, and behaviors.
By Jack Ridge | This is a story about collecting. Not the kind of collecting that clutters our basements and garages because we can’t let go, but the kind of collecting that stimulates life-long curiosity for the natural world. This story is about the natural objects we collect, the ones we look upon with curiosity and wonder. The ones we arrange as a way of understanding how the world operates. In my case, in late childhood, it was about collecting and arranging rocks, minerals, and other things geologic.
By Doug Tallamy | If you live with at least some green around you, chances are you have never thought of space just outside and next to where you live as a wildlife preserve that represents the last opportunity we have for sustaining plants and animals that were once common throughout the U.S.. But that is exactly the role that built landscapes are now playing and will play even more in the near future. If this is news to you, it’s not your fault.
By Ashley Lin | If you don’t know the name of the tree outside your house or apartment (or don’t know if there is a tree outside your window), you’re not alone. Most people don’t think about finding nature when they look out their window at home or at their workplace, so they don’t see nature.
Images and stories by Jimmy Rouse | “In the painting, those are my two grandchildren charging up the hill. The painting is a homage to an early painting hero of mine, Chaim Souttine. He was a Russian Jew who fled to Paris as a teenager because he was beaten in his village for making graven images. At the end of his life, he said there were only two things he wanted to paint, children and trees. I get that. What is more alive than children and trees.”
By Ashley Lin | What can we do when the world is turned upside-down? How do we help young people grapple with the uncertainty, stress, and anxiety that is a constant in life but heightened during a pandemic? How can we come out triumphant, even a bit stronger?
