Benefits of Nature for Kids
Nowadays, children are spending more and more time indoors…think of all the benefits of nature for kids and and the developmental opportunities they’re missing being indoors!
Why Connect With Nature?
The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge. ~ Maria Montessori
How nature can stimulated your child’s senses:
- When your baby observes the way leaves move and sway in the wind, he or she is developing his/her vision.
- As your child hears the many layers of sound in nature, her hearing is stimulated.
- Through smell. When a child smells different flowers like lavender or the damp earth after the rain his sense of smell awakens.
- Through touch. Running bare foot on the lawn or a breeze in the heat of summer
- Tasting different fruits or a sprig of fresh mint.
All of these sensations plays a significant part in your child’s growth and development.
Teach your children to care for nature. Let them help you plant a garden, water and tend to the plants.
Here are a few more sensory experiences that you might find outdoors:
Make a bird feeder and watch the birds, make mud cakes, splash in water, lie on the grass and watch cloud formations or fly a kite. And, of course, set up a teepee in nature 😉
Children have an anxious concern for living beings, and the satisfaction of this instinct fills them with delight. It is therefore easy to interest them in taking care of plants and especially of animals. Nothing awakens foresight in a small child such as this. When he knows that animals have need of him, that little plants will dry up if he does not water them, he binds together with a new thread of love today’s passing moments with those of the morrow.” ~ Maria Montessori