How to Protect Nature: Ideas from Students in Central Oregon
What can you do to protect nature? What can we teach our students to do to protect nature? These important questions are key to understanding how to help the Earth thrive. These are also questions that we ask our students at our Forest Explorers Camp here in Central Oregon. Our Lunch Bites Highlight this week focuses on these important questions as a video is provided of our Forest Explorers sharing what they do to help protect nature. Learning about the environment, and why it is important to protect, allows our students to take proactive steps to take care of the Earth. In fact, our young learners help clean up trash they might find on the ground, and encourage their friends to be kind towards the environment around them. Now this shows some proactive learning!
When explaining to children why nature is important, it’s important to start with the basics. Without trees we would not have oxygen to breathe. Without the sun we would not be able to thrive. This website divides the benefits of nature into five essential groups: intellectual benefits, emotional benefits, social benefits, physical benefits, and environmental benefits. These are also benefits that our Forest Explorer camps strive to teach our students. Nature benefits us intellectually because we can learn from plants growing. Nature benefits us emotionally because it allows us to freely move and express ourselves. Nature benefits us socially because we can interact with our friends as we play outside. Nature benefits us physically because it gets us moving and breathing hard under the warm sun. And finally we benefit nature because we can learn to take care of and protect it. That’s a lot of benefits! But some may say that the last benefit might be the most important, that we can benefit nature. So what can we do?
Our Forest Explorers have come up with many different ideas in this YouTube video on how to protect nature. After watching the video, make a list of all the different ways that you can protect nature!
For more Lunch Bite Flyers with activities in both English and Spanish, click here.