Erasmus+ project "Little Nature Lovers"
Nr. 2020-1-LV01-KA229-077504
Children And Nature
Children, especially preschoolers, can record things into their long-term memory in learning environments, which stimulate all the senses. Nowadays kids spend more time playing on gadgets than they do being physically active outside. Since they have less and less direct experiences in nature, these kids will miss out crucial opportunities to enhance their overall well-being, health and relationships. Many children today do not have a lot of direct or indirect contact with and access to the natural world. Direct experience with nature during childhood is of great importance to influence the children's relationship with nature as a child now, but later as an adult. Sensory experiences will develop understanding and enrich child’s appreciation of the great outdoors.
Playing in nature children develop a sense of wonder and curiosity about elements of nature (e.g. weather, flora and fauna, sand, water), and become inspired and motivated to explore, discover, inquire, critically think, and reflect about the real world.
During this project we focus on the following objectives:
To enable teachers to acquire knowledge and competence to use nature as a learning environment via engaging children in outdoor nature activities;
To provide teachers with competence in nature based interdisciplinary lessons;
To inculcate teachers with new ideas and methods to guide special needs kids in nature activities;
To promote the formation of the child's ecological awareness and attitude focusing on trees, plants, birds and small animals;
To develop children’s creative and cognitive skills in Maths, Science and Art in nature;
To enable teachers to work in a mutual exchange with other kindergartens’ teachers to gain new ideas, insights, and methods across Europe.
Our project officially started on September 2020. Every participating country did a really enthusiastic work. Since the IT tools available in each country were different, first most of us needed some training to get to know them. We had to examine the possible tools (more than e-mails) and find those ones we all can use for our project purposes. In addition to e-mails, we set up common platforms and shared the responsibility and maintenance of these platforms.
