Transcript of Nature Play

remember being a kid endless days spent Outdoors climbing trees scraping knees and playing in nature just as nature intended well Play Time Has [Music] Changed the average Aussie kid spends 52 hours a week in front of screens and only 40 minutes outside not only that but new research reveals that only one out of every three kids plays outside every day that's compared to three and four children just one generation ago and it sounds crazy but one in every four Aussie kids has never even climbed a tree it's just not natural so what can we do about [Music] it even though this place is man-made the fact that it's immersed within natural principles and Concepts is a real bonus modern children are Bubble wrapped but in settings such as this taking incremental risks allows their growth and development to occur at a gradual and sequential rate daily greenplay has been linked to the relief of 8hd symptoms reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms improvements in confidence and self-esteem and increases in academic [Music] performance kids need opportunities to take risks and playgrounds like this let them test their boundaries according to the research without this vital interaction with the natural world some of our kids most basic life skills are at risk of being lost a lot of children now don't have good gross motor skills flexibility agility they're all on a downward spiral we're seeing endurance and strength also on a decline said the picture is pretty bleak as great as this place is it's still man-made but elsewhere in the country kids are getting even deeper into nature here at the bundan on trust education center kids are getting the kind of nature play their parents or grandparents might have enjoyed enjoyed our program out here at bundon is part of a program that our children learn outside every single week of the year where they go outside for half or whole day blocks so the activities they've done here today are a sensory [Music] walk and then they've had to go down to the river and they've picked up sticks or leaves or whatever else they could find to make creative interpretations of their Journey here today and the overall aim will have a link to the the curriculum somewhere and it might be in maths or in English or in science whatever the learning area would [Music] be so in the classroom what we're hoping to achieve is that the children are using their experiences from the outdoors to create really enriched pieces of academic work that stimulate their learning through the curriculum and really bring nature into their lives and every part of their work you need to do is Amanda's PhD research is still ongoing but already the data she's collected is showing some Trends based on initial data it's really promising their academic results from about week three or week four of the program really started to improve and we noticed immediately a different connection with the natural world as soon as we took them out there these kids are really lucky Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world and with most of us living in big cities not everyone has access to the outdoors for most kids the next best thing is to maximize the amount of natural play that's available in our Urban environments so Kathleen we're smack bang in the middle of Sydney a huge big city and we've got this amazing play Space what have we been seeing Happening Here what we're seeing is children actually engaging with their space in a natural way without any direction from adults and in a very unstructured play Space we've seen them explore the the physical environment by climbing trees by crawling over rocks and stones to see if this green stuff really has any effect on a kid's development Kathleen did something amazing she studied several schools and painstakingly measured every cubic meter of vegetation from the amount of grass on the ground to the height width and volume of every tree and shrub we worked with children ages 8 through to 11 and we looked at their capacity to pay attention before playtime and then after playtime and then we looked at their academic performance in National testing what we found there was that attention and mood did increase after play time which is as you would expect and what we also found was that children who had been in playgrounds that had higher amounts of vegetation that was able to explain up to a 5 to 10% increase in children's academic performance [Music] ATB so Kathleen this is what I think of when I think about play in the past is this going to be the play of the future once more well I hope so this sort of play has got a range of benefits but what we need to also be doing is to be incorporating it into our everyday if we were building School Playgrounds that had natural spaces like this if we were engaging in Environmental Education within the school curriculum we would see a range of benefits at a translate back into the classroom so there you have it even if you live in the heart of the city you can still search out and find nature your kids health and their report card depends on [Music] it