Introducing Nature Class

I have been rereading Last Child in the Woods while working on Nature Class, and one passage early in the book has stayed with me. Richard Louv describes a contradiction in modern childhood. Children can know a great deal about environmental problems on the other side of the world while their "physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading."

A child might be able to explain climate change and not know the tree growing outside their classroom. They can learn the parts of a flower from a diagram without ever pulling one apart, or watch a video about worms without having held one. None of that makes the classroom less valuable. It does make me wonder what we lose when knowing about the natural world comes apart from meeting it.

That is why Nature Class exists. It is an open source project that helps teachers, parents and other adults take children outside to learn from the places already around them. You say roughly where you are, how old the children are and a little about your setting, and it helps you run a session shaped by the season, the weather and what is likely to be happening outside that day. The point is not to put children in front of another screen. The screen is for the adult, before the door opens. The interesting part happens outside.

Three beliefs sit behind it.

Children learn the living world by touching it

Soil becomes interesting once you have dug through it and found roots, stones and something with legs. Seed dispersal makes sense after you have watched a dandelion seed go over a fence. Weather is a different subject once you have stood in it and noticed which way the clouds are moving and what last night's rain did to the ground.

There is research behind this too. A 2022 systematic review in Frontiers in Public Health pulled together 147 studies of nature-based outdoor learning in schools and found evidence for greater engagement, stronger social and collaborative skills, gains in aspects of children's self-concept and some academic outcomes. The picture is not perfectly tidy, and "outdoor learning" covers many different things. But it lines up with what teachers have always known. Children learn a great deal by encountering the thing itself.

Nature is one of the best classrooms we have, and it does not need to be spectacular

This is the part I care about most. A few trees at the edge of a playground are enough to watch a season turn. An old wall has lichens on it. A patch of bare soil changes after heavy rain. In autumn, two trees standing side by side can behave completely differently, and nobody has to explain why that is interesting.

Access to nature should not depend on living beside a forest or being able to organise a coach. Nature Class has to work in a primary school playground in London as well as it works beside a wood. It should be just as useful to a parent in the park, a library running a Saturday activity or a community group with a small garden. The places children already spend their time are enough to begin.

If we want children to care for the Earth, they need the chance to know it first

Environmental education often begins with the enormous problems: climate, extinction, pollution. Children should understand those things. But I am increasingly sure we also have to begin much closer to home. Let a child become fascinated by the beetle under a log. Let them learn which birds visit their playground, plant something and come back to see whether it lived, or notice for themselves that the evenings are getting lighter.

The research on children's environmental behaviour points the same way. Reviews of the field keep finding time in nature among the things associated with caring for it later, alongside environmental education and a range of social influences. A few afternoons outside do not make a conservationist. Familiarity does seem to matter, though. It is hard to feel much for a living world you rarely get to meet.

The question underneath

Nature Class also grew out of something we have been asking at Rewyld for a while. Can technology help us pay more attention to the world around us, rather than taking more of our attention away from it? Nature Class is one small experiment in what that could look like. Use the technology to help an adult see what is worth going out for today, then let it get out of the way.

Nature Class has been developed alongside experts working in education and outdoor learning, including PlantEnvironment in the UK, and with the support of the Assembly Code Fellowship. We are now beginning to work with schools and partners in the UK and US, which is where it will be tested. 

It is early, and we are sharing it while there is plenty left to learn. If you are a teacher, a parent, an outdoor educator or part of an organisation that works with children, you can try it at https://natureclass.education.  It is free to use and we hope to keep it this way for as long as we can. would genuinely like to hear what works and what does not.