The Outdoor Environment

For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear – to ignore.

Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods.

With these words the National Trust’s report, Natural Childhood, starts.

2012 was the year that we were no longer able to avoid the subject of Nature Deficit Disorder. In the public consciousness for the first time, Natural Childhood highlighted the effect that changing lifestyles have had on our nation’s children – the effect that this ‘starving’ of natural environmental interaction is having on their health, wellbeing and learning ability.

The Outdoor Environment is a report written by The Learning Escape that seeks to take the concept further and specifically address the long-term benefits for the environment of learning within natural, outdoor space.

Download ‘The Outdoor Environment’

Resources for Educators

To support the report, we have drawn together resources, teaching aids, curriculum guides,  lesson plans, activities and helpful links. The resource centre aims to promote best practice and help teachers to embed environmental learning across the curriculum areas.

We have compiled a set of lessons and activities for Key Stage One and Key Stage Two and an extensive list of useful websites for teachers.

• The Outdoor Environment in Secondary Schools
• Building design for eco-classrooms
• Presentation: Inspiring Environmental Citizenship