We move through life learning through our senses, taking in thousands of stimuli every day. For young kids especially, experiencing the world through the senses is key to understanding the world around us.
“OUCH, thats hot,” as a three year old gets too close
to a campfire even though mom already told them not to.
They just had to learn for themselves!
“Woahhh”, says a child as she works to balance on a
new climbing tree, feeling her body in space and her
hands and feet grasping the branches.
Children learn through multi-sensory experiences; feeling the earth beneath them, noticing the clouds coming in to prepare for a storm, smelling a food they’ve never tried before and bravely taking a small bite, or getting startled at the sound of a dog barking.
This blog post highlights some benefits of nature play and our senses. There are several resources linked at the bottom of this blog post written by Masters of Social Work Intern Talia Rennert-Ariev.
We use more than just the five senses that naturally come to mind. There are two sensory systems that often go unrecognized, but are important when understanding child development:
The vestibular system and the proprioceptive system.
The vestibular system is located in our inner ear and helps us maintain balance and spatial awareness. It detects the position and movement of your head and body, and helps you coordinate posture, eye movements and equilibrium. When children climb on trees, swing on swings, or play a superhero chase game outside, they are using their vestibular system to navigate their body’s movement in space.
The proprioceptive system, or proprioception, helps you to understand where your body parts are in relation to each other, without the use of other senses. When we are able to touch our nose with our eyes closed, or knowing how much force to use to pick up a full cup of water without spilling it, we are using our proprioceptive system. Using force to pull a rope or dig a hole uses this sense.
Nature play is a multisensory experience.
Climbing a tree or building a stick fort may feel like a simple task, and it is to an extent. But we are naturally using all seven of these senses to navigate through outdoor play. When children use multiple senses to engage in fun outdoor activities, like building sandcastles at the creekside or finding uniquely-shaped leaves to trace in their nature journal, they are optimimizing their sensory integration. These diverse sensory experiences that occur in nature are NEEDED to promote healthy development in young children.
By immersing oneself in their natural environment, the child can grow their imagination, strengthen their brain and motor skills, build intrinsic self-regulation techniques, among other beautiful developments needed for a healthy body and mind.
Not only does early exposure to nature play provide rich sensory experiences, but research shows that outdoor, multisensory environments support nervous system regulation among children. Kids, especially those under ten, are constantly required to focus their attention and exert significant self-control every day. Think about when you were back in the early years of school, trying to grasp addition and subtraction for the first time, or sitting down for what seems like an eternity learning how to read a clock. Your teacher is working hard to keep you focused on one task, meanwhile, you notice the dogs playing outside through the classroom window, your best friend just ran down the hallway waving past you, and you can't help thinking of the exciting game you started playing at home.
Children, and well to be fair, everyone, gets attention fatigue. Attention restoration theory, or ART, suggests that the hard-edged focus that students must bring to schoolwork demands a lot from the brain, quickly depleting its resources. We all have a limited resource of attention, and when we have to focus on one thing at a time, we are exhausting our mental resources.
Similarly, "ego-depletion" is the idea that we have to exert a lot of self-control throughout the day which takes up our mental resources, causing exhaustion.
Conversely, nature has been suggested to replenish these depleted resources because of its ability to capture attention without effort. ART argues that play in a natural, multisensory environment, like at Nature School Cooperative (an outdoor nature based preschool and forest school for older grades), allows restoration, or recovery, from attention fatigue, which improves our ability to self-regulate.
Self-regulation can seem like quite the buzzword and something we all (adults included) strive to be good at. We are constantly struck with challenges in our daily lives where we need to regulate our nervous system: stuck in traffic when a truck cuts you off, moving through a loud and busy crowd, or trying to navigate how to share toys during outside play time.
Self-regulation is a multidimensional construct that includes aspects of emotion, cognition, and behavior. It is the ability to orient one's attention in response to fear or other environmental changes and may include top-down processes, like executive fucntioning or bottom-up regulation. Executive functioning involves working memory, attentional or cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control.
Essentially, self-regulation is the ability to control one's emotions, behaviors, and thoughts in response to a situation. It is a foundational skill that is important for preschool-aged children to help them develop social-emotional skills. Learning to regulate reactions to strong emotions such as frustration, anger, fear, sadness, or excitement, is a key skill that young children are developing.
Research shows that time spent in natural environments provides children with greater opportunities to self-regulate. Multiple quasi-experimental studies have examined the relationship between exposure to greenspaces during school and self-regulation, showing that children of an average age of five perform better on self-regulation performance measures when spending more time in green schoolyards.
Now, not all children experience the world in the same way. Children on the autism spectrum or those with attention-deficit or sensory-processing disorders, may feel more or less sensitive in one or more of their senses. Feeling their wet sock after stepping in a puddle may feel unbearable, for example. Neurodiverse children may need unique and individualized approaches to help them regulate their nervous systems.
Fortunately, nature play is designed exactly for that!
Nature can reduce sensory overload by providing a quieter, more soothing environment. Engaging in repetitive or rythmic activities like walking on trails or swinging on tree branches stimulate the vestibular and proprioceptive senses which can feel grounding. Similarly, heavy work like digging or carrying logs provides deep pressure that relaxes the nervous system.
Think about when a child uses their hands to play with squishy, cold mud. Or when they are using physical energy to climb a tree or splash in puddles. These are all unique sensory tools that aid to the development of self-regulation skills. Nature play may have "instorative" benefits, which is a state of being more balanced and less impacted by stressful events.
To sum up, nature play provides a rich sensory environment that all kids benefit from! Unstructured, child-led play allows engagement in activities that feel comfortable, giving children autonomy that reduces stress and supports their sensory needs. Nature play offers a safe environment for children to practice self-regulation, manage sensory sensitivities, and relax their nervous systems in a way that supports their individual needs.
For more resources on nature as a multisensory experience, check out:
"Nature Play for Our Children's 7 Senses"
"Nature Play and Our Propioceptive System"
"Nature Play and Our Vestibular System"
"Exposure to nature helps kids to self-regulate"
This post was written by Talia Rennert-Ariev who recently completed her Masters in Social Work degree from the University of Denver. Talia is beginning her career in Social Work, and has focused her studies on child and adolescent mental health, and human-animal-environment interactions. You can find more about here and connect here:
Our blog posts are written for a diverse audience of families, guardians, parents, practitioners, graduate students and other adults with topics covering a “Tangled Bank” (one of Darwin’s most enduring metaphors) of interests, initiatives, and networks. Through Outdoor Nature Based Preschools (ONB Preschools), Forest School for older grades K-8 and Emergent Strategy Bushcraft Workshops for Adults, we explore the perception, observation, interpretation and reciprocity of senses from human and non humans’ perspective. Central to the topics for all age groups is the concept that Early Childhood is “Not just cute, but powerful and incredibly important”.
Find out more about our Outdoor Preschool here.
Stay tuned to our blog posts for adult learning workshops both online and in person in 2024.
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