Comparing the Impact of Nature, Blended, and Traditional Preschools on Children’s Resilience: Some Nature May Be Better Than None

This study examined the effect of nature preschools on the development of key protective factors associated with psychological resilience. The Deveraux Early Childhood Assessment for Preschoolers, Second Edition (DECA-P2), was used to assess the growth in the protective factors of initiative, self-regulation, and attachment in 87 children who attended nature, blended, and traditional preschool classes within the same school district. Study results suggest that nature preschool participation was important in the context of initiative. Blended classes, where some nature-based practices were incorporated into traditional preschool classes, were sufficient in the sense of being more impactful than traditional classes on self-regulation, attachment, and the total protective factors overall. Implications are discussed within the context of the limitations of the study.

Young Children’s Contributions to Sustainability: The Influence of Nature Play on Curiosity, Executive Function Skills, Creative Thinking, and Resilience

Environmental education for young children has great potential for fostering the skills, values, and dispositions that support sustainability. While North American guidelines emphasize the importance of using the natural world for open-ended exploration, discovery, and play, this approach has been criticized for lacking the transformative power necessary for meaningfully contributing to sustainability issues. Four pilot studies were conducted exploring the influence of nature play in the context of nature preschools on children’s curiosity, executive function skills, creative thinking, and resilience. These studies used established quantitative instruments to measure growth in these constructs among nature preschool participants, comparing this growth with participants in high quality, play-based, non-nature preschools. The results suggest a positive contribution of nature play, with greater levels of curiosity, creative thinking, and resilience than what was observed in the non-nature preschool participants, and executive function skills similar to the non-nature preschool participants and exceeding national norms. Collectively, these pilot studies suggest the potential contribution of nature play in the context of education for sustainability.

Growing a Nature Kindergarten That Can Flourish

Growing a nature kindergarten that can flourish takes a community, careful planning, and sustained support. In 2011, the Sooke School District in British Columbia, Canada undertook the project of creating a nature kindergarten when outdoor programs of this kind did not exist in the Canadian public school system. Inspired by the well-established forest school and nature preschool models in northern Europe, a program to take 22 kindergarten students outside into nature every morning, regardless of the weather, was developed. This article explores how a unique framework and set of guiding principles were co-created by a diverse advisory committee. It also describes how the hiring, education, and ongoing support of the program's two educators — a kindergarten teacher and an early childhood educator — became critical to its success. The article offers an overview on steps taken, including how the idea was born, working within the public school system, building a framework and principles, hiring and education, preparing the educators, learning from our first year, ongoing support, and remaining questions. The authors’ intention is not to articulate best practices, but to share key aspects of the program's development and implementation phases that allowed the nature kindergarten to thrive over the last 5 years.