Chapters
We’ve been cooped up inside for far too long! Is your child starting to prefer indoor life? Wondering how you can help them become a nature-lover? It’s never too late to instil a love for nature! Try a few of these ideas today.
The benefits of nature
Nature is the best medicine! It has physical, emotional, and even academic benefits for kids and adults alike.
🌳 Spending time in nature helps to grow your brain and avoid too much screen time.
🌳 Nature boosts happiness and is wonderful for mental health.
🌳 When outdoors, kids have a place to be loud, fast, rambunctious...all those qualities you don’t appreciate inside the flat!
🌳 Nature provides challenges to overcome - weather, steep terrain, fatigue - that improve resilience and help your child work harder in all parts of life (including school!).
Nature is so great for kids that the Wildlife Trust recommends a full hour outdoors every day. Time to turn off Minecraft and head outside!
How to teach your child to be in awe of nature
Make sure your child goes outside every day! Aim for an hour.
Kids have different ways of learning, so provide a variety of activities for them to choose from for outside play - the same as you do indoors! Be sure to allow for plenty of unstructured time too - don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to schedule all the time!
🌳 Go for a walk or a hike!
- Try a listening walk where you see how many different sounds you can hear.
- Or bring along a camera to collect photos of cool things you see on a picture walk.
- Let your child lead the way and set the pace for a walk!
- If you can, walk rather than drive for your next trip to the shops.
🌳 Try forest bathing
- The practice of spending quiet, uninterrupted time among the trees. Silence your phone, take out your earbuds, and just take it all in.
🌳 Try grounding with your kids
This when you walk barefoot outside on the grass - or even on the pavement! Grounding is supposed to help you feel super connected to nature. 🤗 🌍
🌳 Take a trip to a park
It can be as simple as your local play park, or you can make it a goal to visit as many national parks as you can.
🌳 Go camping
A great way to connect with nature is to spend all night camping in it!
🌳Find a sports team
If your child likes sports, find an outdoor league for them to join this summer.
🌳 Take swimming lessons
Or visit the local pool. Water is calming and swimming is fantastic exercise.
🌳 Grow food yourselves
You learn to grow from seed, what are helpful or unhelpful bugs, and how to cook with what you grew. You can also try growing flowers and practice flower arranging or flower pressing.
🌳 Explore nature topics
Find out which nature topics interest your child the most, and let them do some independent learning about it. The more they know, the more they will love and respect nature. You can study bugs, plants, weather, geological features, volcanoes, rain forest, other forests, desserts...the possibilities are endless!
🌳 Find a tutor
Last but not least, outsource some of this teaching to a professional! As a parent, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the responsibilities of raising a child. Let us take some of that load off your shoulders.
Does your child really want to learn more about weather patterns? A GoStudent tutor can help. Is your child super interested in reading about volcanoes, but needs to brush up on some reading skills? A GoStudent tutor can help. Book a trial lesson to see how we can work for you! 🚀
