February is a fascinating month nature wise. Being the “last” month of winter, in a kind of-sort of way, Mary Holland sums up this month in terms of survival. Animals are just trying to survive, to make it through these cold lean times and get to the sun dolloped freshets of spring. But like beavers, who use temporary warming temperatures to break through the ice and look for fresh greens to supplement their withered stores, our kids can enjoy the intensity of the cold with short, invigorating adventures, walks and playtime in the ice, snow and cold, and take advantage of periodic thaws to break up the ice and play in the snowy mud. Children love to play. It is their basic way to discover the limits and expanses of their powers, and to explore the flows and folds of reality. “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”(Winnicot , Playing and Reality). So get outside and play.
The first thing I suggest to teachers and schools interested in implementing an outdoor nature curriculum is to find relatively “wild places” that children can explore and play in. It is amazing what happens when children are released from the confines of the indoor classroom and the “classroom” becomes the great outdoors. Of course as the responsible adult, you need to set the physical boundaries of the play area and be vigilant for possible hazards. But once you make it a regular part of your practice to find natural places where the children under your care can play, each child’s cognitive, emotional and physical development (and their nature, science, and language literacies) will grow by leaps and bounds. As you watch them play in a grove of trees, around the bend in a river, down a rocky gully, in an open meadow, or up a shrub covered hill, you will find ways to extend and deepen their explorations and connections with the natural world. As they learn how to play independently and with each other, they learn how to learn, how to figure out problems, overcome challenges, cultivate their curiosity, wonder and creativity, come up with new ways of learning, growing, changing, and new ways of living with each other, learning from each other, and loving the earth.
David Sobel identifies and elaborates on seven play themes that emerge when children are allowed free time to play in nature: physical adventure; fantasy, imaginative and dramatic play; cultivating animal allies and relationships; maps, paths and journeys; special places and spots; small miniature worlds that can be discovered, built and destroyed; and hunting, gathering and collecting. You will see all these types of play emerge and more if you take kids outside to “wild,” natural places and let them play.
A friend of mine who has a child on the autism spectrum once told me that playing outdoors, “levels the playing field because the outdoor environment is so open to interpretation.” The ever-changing icy river landscape is a spectacle to behold and explore, and the little mini “ice ponds” on a field captivate the kids and turn them into “ice miners” and traders. Temperature and humidity create all the different kinds of snow and ice that children can explore and play with, allowing children to take advantage of its different properties in creative and imaginative ways. Then take an even closer look at snow flakes with a magnifying glass and begin to wonder why they have different shapes. Use a frozen piece of black velvet on a piece of cardboard to have better luck isolating a six-sided ice chrystal and start investigating why every snowflake is different but all snow crystals have six sides!
This is the last month where you can experience the “winter silence.” Near the end of the month you will begin hearing the chickadees and cardinals start to sing, establishing territories, looking for mates, and just feeling happy to be alive. Savor and appreciate the special beauty of winter–icycles, snow, ice, silence, the winter quiescence as we and the natural world regroup for the tumultuous, blooming , buzzing confusion of spring–it will be gone before you know it.
Another thing to look for during winter, and something that will sparkle, glow, glitter and sing out to you as soon as you start looking for it, is lichen. A fabulously complex combination of bacteria, algae and fungi, lichen paint the winter rocks with purple, blue, green, yellow and silver. My 3 year old grandson and I recently stumbled across some stunning lichen on a cold, wet rainy day and he asked me, “why is it so green?” “Supple physiology allows lichen to shine with life when other creatures are locked down for winter.” I didn’t say that to my grandson ( I said, “I don’t know, but it’s really cool “) but David George Haskell did in his incredible book, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.
Start a game, a project, set an intention with your kids, to look for the first signs of spring. There is no full moon in February this year, but March 1st is the Sap Moon or Worm Moon, signifiying that sap is beginning to flow in the trees and the Sugar Maples, and that the earth is thawing and worms are starting to work their way up to the surface. You will begin to hear birds singing, smell skunk cabbage heating its way out of the frozen earth, and see other signs of the great thaw yet to come.
The end of winter is also a great time for stories and hot cider, so get into storytime mode and tell some of your most important stories, either inside in a cozy spot, or if you are lucky enough, around a fire outside. The stories that you share will inform the kinds of play your children engage in, and the play that they engage in will inform the stories about themselves and the world that they can imagine and tell in turn. Johan Huizinga in studying the play elements in language, civility, ethics, law,war, knowledge, poetry, myth, philosophy,art and religion comes to the conclusion that perhaps “Homo Ludens” or man the player, rather then Homo Sapiens, rational man, is more definitive in expressing the range and extent of human cultural aspirations and achievements. As an early childhood teacher I would heartily agree.
Resources:
Winnicott, Playing and Reality https://onluminousgrounds.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/the-creative-space-of-play/
David Sobel’s 7 types of play taken from a great outdoor education blog outdoor-classrooms.com http://www.outdoor-classrooms.com/2015/02/david-sobels-children-and-nature-principles/
Comprehensive lesson plan for exploring snowflakes with older children ( 7 and up) and building up some background knowledge for yourself https://siarchives.si.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/1.%20Looking%20at%20Snowflakes%20-%20Shape%20and%20Structure%20Activity.pdf