Autumn leaves

The winds of the last few days are causing the leaves to start falling and even though it is only September it feels like Autumn is on its way. As I walk around my local patch the hawes are ripe on the hawthorn trees, beech mast litters the ground and rowan berries are a brilliant bright red. All around us are the seeds of the next generation.

Many children are totally unaware of this. They don’t see the trees and the berries because they don’t know to look, they spend most of their time indoors. Richard Louv coined the phrase “Nature Deficit Disorder” in his book “Last Child in the Woods” and he uses this phrase to describe the alleged trend that children are spending less time outdoors and are losing touch with nature and the seasons. There are many reasons suggested for this occurrence and Louv says that this has profound implications for the health of future generations and the health of the planet. Attention disorders, depression and obesity all get a mention.

There is an increasingly large movement of people who take this work seriously and are working to get children outside and actively learning. One way is to take children out to gather the seeds of the local trees, identify them using books, databases, websites or other people, and then to plant the seeds. Hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and beech all make good hedges and would make a brilliant green corridor if you planted them around your school boundary. They would also disguise those horrible metal fences most schools have – those ones that make the school look more like an open prison!

Besides fallen leaves, a lot of twigs and branches have been brought down by the winds. Rather than clearing them up and binning them, why not make small piles around the school grounds as insect hotels. A quick google will bring up lots of suggestions as to how to build them and how to use them to teach children about wildlife and food chains.

And all of this will provide opportunities to teach numeracy, literacy, art, …. and all those other subjects, and to tick all those curriculum boxes.