Supporting Distance Learning by Connecting Children to Nature

By Maria Granados and Gareth Thomson

On March 17, 2020, the Government of Alberta gave the order to close schools across the province due to COVID-19. School closures presented a unique set of challenges for teachers who were suddenly tasked with delivering on the curriculum through distance learning and for families who were forced to step up and act as educators in their homes. However, for many Albertan non-profit organizations, including us here at the Alberta Council for Environmental Education (ACEE), school closures presented a new opportunity to support students, teachers, and families.

At ACEE, we’ve become very familiar with peer-reviewed research over the past 40 years, by giants such as Thomas Tanner and Louise Chawla, (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00958964.1980.9941386) on significant life experiences that tells us that one of the best ways to instill in children environmental values — and create environmentalists and conservationists! — is by spending time outdoors with a trusted adult. We know that when children have an appreciation for nature, they are more likely to act to protect it. Distance learning opens up a world of possibilities for children to connect with nature right in their backyards (or local parks!), and we thought we could help parents and teachers by providing quick, low-budget ideas on how to connect children with nature at home.
Thus, we created a family-friendly newsletter full of activities that teachers could easily assign and that parents could re-create in their backyards, ‘pushing out’ some superb activities and resources created by our talented environmental education colleagues working for other NGOs or government agencies as well as highlighting simple yet engaging activities that parents could do with their children. We pulled from resources such as Five-Minute Fieldtrips, Numeracy and Literacy in Nature, and more. We then reached out to the ‘ecosystem’ of organizations who wake up in the morning thinking about how to support Alberta parents and asked for their help in the distribution of our weekly newsletter. Working with these groups, our teacher network, we distributed these e-newsletters to over 2,000 parents and teachers on a weekly basis; with the help of 28 partner networks as well as social media, we were able to reach tens of thousands of teachers, parents and educators, with more signing up for the parent newsletter every week!