Children in the Woods

Girl outside with bubbles

I had a great opportunity to discuss playing outdoors with 6th graders this week.

Through the Resource Teacher program I worked with a phenomenal language teacher at a middle school in Circle Pines, MN. The program gave students some historical knowledge of what it was like being a kid 50 – 150 years ago through short readings (linked below), gave them an opportunity to play outside – completely unstructured, and then gave them time to reflect, journal, and discuss their thoughts and experiences.

Most of the students said they spend a lot of time outdoors playing outside. However, they expressed a desire for more freedom with their playtime. About half the students said that they thought their parents had more fun as children because they needed to be more creative in their play; they didn’t have organized team sports and technology to create rules and entertain them.

They also cited too much homework as a time barrier to outdoor playtime. I thought this might be a clever ploy, but the teacher confirmed that the students do bear a large homework burden.

The three readings were from the introduction to The Last Child in the Woods, a story about an encounter with John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt’s boyhood journal.