Bringing Nature into Your Classroom

Bring the outdoors inside by incorporating natural objects and nature awareness into all aspects of your curriculum. Follow these suggestions from Project Learning Tree’s Environmental Experiences for Early Childhood.

Involve the Children

• Collect natural objects (pebbles, rocks, bark, seeds, twigs, leaves, acorns, pinecones). Children can use them in the art area; display them on the Discovery Table; and sort, count, and compare them in the math area.
• Grow potted plants. Rosemary, mint, thyme, basil, and sage all grow well indoors. Install grow lights, if necessary. You can even grow lettuce and eat it!
• Adopt a classroom pet. Classroom pets can help children learn how to care for animals and provide many opportunities for observing animal behavior and physiology. Classroom animals can range from hamsters to ants. Except for some insects, wild animals do not make good pets and are often illegal to own. If you do not wish to adopt a permanent classroom pet, consider temporarily keeping ladybugs, caterpillars, or snails in a terrarium.
• Cut out animal tracks, and tape them to the floor. Place them in each animal’s walking pattern.
• Arrange glow-in-the-dark stars into constellations on the ceiling.
• Hang cutouts of clouds, birds, bats, bugs, and other airborne objects from the ceiling.
• Use a nature calendar to track daily weather, moon phases, and other natural events.
• Put a thermometer with a highly visible liquid tube and large numbers just outside a window.
• Set up a bird-feeding station outside a window. Keep binoculars and labeled pictures of common birds and animals nearby.
• Set up a sundial in a sunny window, and teach children how to mark the shadows. Place a vase or other object in the window, and record shadow lengths at a specific time of day over the course of the school year. Watch the shadows change with the seasons.
• Collect or build child-friendly instruments that replicate natural sounds (e.g., rainsticks, drums, birdcalls).
• Construct mobiles made of twigs and leaves.
• Showcase nature are projects in a designated display area.

Continue to fill the day with nature

• Play CDs of nature sounds. Play a different animal song each day of the week when the children arrive. For example, play cardinal songs on Mondays, green frog calls on Tuesday, and cricket songs on Wednesdays.
• Stock the reading corner shelves with nature-themed picture books, guides, and reference books.
• Provide nature journals for each child to use throughout the year.
• Furnish wooden flower presses for pressing leaves and other plant material.
• Supply costumes and puppets of animals and plants that live in your area.
• Provide small logs of different tree species. Children will enjoy feeling how one tree’s bark differs form the next. You will need to replace these items as necessary. Be careful bringing these items indoors as they are often homes for many insects and other living things.
• Provide fat crayons without paper wrappings to make rubbings of natural objects like leaves and bark.
• Take or collect full-color photographs of plants and animals that live in your area. Label and laminate them. Organize them into a field guide to your schoolyard, or leave them loose for children to select and sort.