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Eco!Wonder
Encouraging Our Youngest Children to Care

Jane Thornton
October, 2010

• How can we encourage three, four and five year old children to begin to realize that they can play an important role in keeping our environment healthy?
• How can we help three, four, and five year old children understand the cycles of nature?
• How can we offer three, four and five year old children unrestricted experiences in nature so that they can explore and discover on their own?

These are the questions that the Pre-Primary faculty at Laurel School grappled with in our desire to inspire young children to journey down a path full of learning, exploration and joy and encourage them to become responsible caretakers of the natural world.  Towards that end, we read the book The Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv over the summer of 2007 and discussed it throughout the next school year.  The book centers around many of the topics that we wanted to cover with the children and we hoped that it would answer some of our questions. We were particularly interested in what Louv calls “nature deficit disorder” in small children and how critical it is that we as adults do all we can to expose them to the natural world. 

With the start of the school year, we began our book discussions during our regularly scheduled faculty meetings without any idea where they would lead.   After a couple of large group discussions we all agreed that we wanted to write a curriculum that would reflect the Laurel School Pre-Primary School response to Louv’s book. We began to call our program Eco!Wonder.  We chose the word wonder as it is one of our program’s core values. Once it had a name, Eco!Wonder took life.  The Eco!Wonder curriculum would take advantage of the learning opportunities offered not only on our suburban Lyman Campus but also on our Butler Campus which is set on 140 aces, the majority of it undisturbed land that offers the  perfect setting for all types of experiences with the natural world. 

It soon became apparent that this was a bigger job than we could tackle in the time that we had together as a group.  Five teachers volunteered to create the framework for the Eco!Wonder curriculum.  The bulk of the work would be done during the summer of 2008 with the goal to launch the program at the start of the new school year. The committee’s first charge was to craft a mission statement for Eco!Wonder.  The words they chose do an excellent job of reflecting our goals and hopes for the program.

The mission of the Eco!Wonder program is to research and design curriculum for the Pre-Primary School which will: 

• foster a connection with the outdoor environment of the Lyman and Butler Campuses through exploration and experimentation
• promote sustainability through stewardship of our two campuses and the world at large.

Throughout the summer the group worked on the curriculum which they presented to the Pre-Primary faculty at opening meetings.  We turned our enclosed courtyard into an “Eco!Wonder  lab,” with borders for gardens.  We placed a rain barrel and solar fountain in the courtyard, a “tumbler” composter out by the playground, purchased some gardening tools and were ready to go. 

From the first day of school, the children planted seeds and tended the seedlings in their classrooms, worked with our groundskeeper and parent volunteers to transplant them at the appropriate times in our gardens, watered the plants from collected rain water and gleefully dumped their snack and lunch scraps into the “tumbler” and took turns spinning the handle.  In the classrooms we talked about recycling, turning lights off when not needed, using only the amount of water needed for a chore and paying attention to the number of paper towels they used when they washed their hands.  We witnessed the life cycles of plants and insects and animals.  From Halloween on, our classroom jack o’lanterns decomposed in the Eco!Wonder lab. The children were thrilled to see the tiny shoots of new pumpkin plants appear the next spring and the following fall we were able to harvest the one pumpkin that made it to maturity.  At the Butler Campus, each class took seasonal hikes with a naturalist from the Cleveland Metroparks and had plenty of time for self-exploration.  We ended the first year with all of the Pre-Primary children and their families at an “Eco!Wonder” Festival at our Butler Campus. Both children and adults participated in several nature-based projects: a bear hunt, a huge habitat mural, and pond exploration. Not only did we offer the children a culminating experience but we also involved their families in the program.  Our hope was that Eco!Wonder discussions and activities would also take place at home.

That June, we evaluated the first year of “Eco!Wonder”.  We recognized some gaps in the program and debated how to fill them.  The biggest gap was the fact that given the Cleveland winters and the length of the school year, the children were only able to experience part of the growing cycle first hand.  The timing of planting in the classrooms was problematic as the young seedlings did not thrive for long on our windowsills but late frosts made it unpredictable as to when we would be able to transfer the fragile plants from their tiny pots into the ground until almost the end of the school year. Also, most of what we planted was in full bloom during the summer when the children were not around to witness it.  We decided that what we really needed was a greenhouse in our Eco!Wonder lab but we weren’t sure that it could be a possibility.  After much research, consultations with our Director of Facilities and scrutinizing the budget, we found a small heated greenhouse that was rated to withstand Cleveland winter temperatures and snowfall.  Money from the Laurel School Parents’ Association helped to defray the costs. 

The greenhouse was up, wired and ready for the children when they returned to school in September 2009.  Now, in spite of the weather, we could plant seeds, tend them in the greenhouse, and transplant them into the gardens come spring.  We paid very careful attention to what we planted for the gardens as we wanted the children to be able to appreciate the results of their hard work the next fall.   We focused on sunflowers, potatoes, squash, corn and beans.  It was a very exciting day when we harvested our first ear of corn.  The greenhouse made it possible for us to garden all winter long.  One classroom planted bean seeds in the middle of January, cared for them in the greenhouse, brought them into the classroom when they were ready to transplant into larger containers and enjoyed watching the beans reach maturity.   The children were amused that they were harvesting fresh green beans in their classroom while outside there was two feet of snow on the ground.

Another issue that we tackled at the end of that first year was how to bring Eco!Wonder into the homes of all our families.  It was apparent that some children enthusiastically shared what they learned in school about sustainability with their families. Some were even quite insistent that their families do a better job of recycling at home.  However, we wanted to reach more families. Towards that end, we created a poster highlighting the top ten things that could be done at home in order to become an “Eco!Wonder” family.

Each family received a poster at our second annual Eco!Wonder festival.  Our hope was that it would find a place to hang in each household and would be a visual reminder to the children to urge their families to join them on their journey to be responsible citizens of our planet.

Now in the third year of the Eco!Wonder program,  we have introduced the Healthy Snack Initiative,  which is designed to help children establish lifelong eating habits that are healthy and nutritious.  We want the children to become more involved in the preparation of snack. Now, our snack menu is comprised of fresh fruits and vegetables, low fat dairy foods and whole grains. We do as much shopping as possible from local farmers and natural food stores.   Once a week, the children participate in a cooking experience that uses recipes incorporating the wholesome ingredients on the week’s menu.  All teachers have reported that most children, even those who say “I don’t like those…”, have expanded their food choices and are discovering that it is necessary to taste a new food before declaring a dislike of it.

This initiative would not be possible without faculty dedication as each week someone needs to be in charge of the menu planning, shopping and food distribution to the other classrooms.  The response from both the children and the parents tells us that our efforts are well worth it.

At this time we eagerly await the arrival of our new larger greenhouse which will be used alongside the original one which we quickly outgrew.  This greenhouse was funded by donations given in memory of our Head of School’s mother. 

The Eco!Wonder curriculum takes a great deal of time, effort, commitment and passion from every Pre-Primary faculty member.  It takes deliberate weekly planning to fit Eco!Wonder activities into our already packed school day. We strongly believe in the principles of Eco!Wonder and its importance in the lives of young children.  In an effort to slow down the pace of the school day for both adults and children, we made the conscious decision to place the Eco!Wonder curriculum at the core of all that we do in the classroom.  This means spending quite a bit of time re-examining our tried and true themes and deciding which ones to reshape and which ones no longer fit with our curriculum.  As a faculty we are committed to keeping Eco!Wonder alive for the children and for ourselves.  Through Eco!Wonder, the children have become more aware and inquisitive about the world and more responsible about sustainability. The faculty are inspired, renewed, and excited about the curriculum and our new initiatives.  We believe that Eco!Wonder encourages our youngest children to care.