The Inventor, the Scientist and the Orienteer

Lakeside School at Black Kettle Farm offers birth – 3rd grade education and Farm and Forest Summer Camp based on the Waldorf philosophy on a working farm in Essex, NY.

The Inventor, the Scientist and the Orienteer

By Gregg VanDeusen

Keep them warm, keep them fed and keep them dry. During my 15 years as an outdoor educator this became my foundation for teaching. Any imbalance in this and your teaching, their learning, is over. In my 8 years working at Lakeside, my past experience has become increasingly valuable as we spend more and more time outside, exploring informal academics. Our rhythm provides the basics, but once that is covered, what sort of learning can we provide these young and eager adventurers. What is it these kids get from time in the fields and forest, and what do we try and guide them through so they get a valuable experience and nurture their capacity to absorb the coming formal academics of the elementary years?

Let me take you on a few adventures I’ve observed on our Outpost day, the last day of each week where we travel into the forest, to a far campsite off the CATS trails and spend the day as if we are all that exists in the world…..

The Orienteer– We usually take the meadow to the Outpost but I decided one sunny morning to try the secret passageway in. It is a bushwhack of sorts through the woods along the rocky ledge. We then approach from the back side of our destination. As we got closer one of the children chirps up and says “Hey! That’s the outpost over there!”. We are in a sedgy swampy area with a few birch trees and this kid sees the wall of huge hemlocks ahead and the little hill that rises to the bluff that separates us from the outpost and stream. He has never been here before but recognizes and is aware of vegetation transitions and landform contours. In tune enough with his natural surroundings to be able to apply these new observations to what he already knows. These are the ideal situations for children to draw upon previous experiences to form new answers to what they experience, a true seed of creative thinking. Since then, other kids have done the same thing as we approach from new directions having learned directly from this one child’s experience.

The Scientist – As we come down the meadow from the barns we reach a stream we must cross. This same stream we cross again to reach the Outpost. To the children these are two different streams. We don’t follow it to Outpost. It is open and meadowy at the first crossing, dark and foresty at the second. I’m sure even some adults would question whether these are the same stream. One day the children were playing with a clay deposit we found in the stream bank– real deal clay. Clay so fine that it began clouding the stream when we began digging it out. The cloud drifted slowly down stream and the children began showing interest in how far the cloud traveled. They followed it as far as they could until the stream edge was not passable. Then one child says, “Hey when we cross the stream in the meadow, we can see if it went that far!” All the other kids looked amazed, like he said Monday was not rice day or the 5 little pumpkins didn’t sit on the gate. No one argued it, but none truly seemed to grasp the concept. With confidence, the child proved his hypothesis when we crossed again, showing the new silt in the stream, and taught eight others in the process. Experiences built upon one another creates the answers to questions. Life is research.

The Inventor– We saw, as in cut, downed logs at Outpost for firewood. I have two folding saws and one large bow saw we use as a crosscut saw with one person at each end. Sometimes there will be a few children helping and taking turns. While gathering long gangly logs, one of them got an epiphany that we should build a teeter totter. She was very jazzed about the idea so she and I and one other went off to search for a suitable log big enough to sit on but small enough to carry. We found a dead one hung up on another tree so we drug it down and took turns on the crosscut saw. We quickly limbed it with all three saws going. The hard part was carrying it. It really took the three of us. Me in front, one of the bigger children in back and the eager inventor, smaller in stature in the middle. Her sheer enthusiasm and determination carried through to the very end, cheering us all on as we struggled to carry the log. She instructed us on where to place it, and why, after testing it , we had to move it. Finally we found a decent spot and had little time to play on it as snack time had come. So this girl had an idea, sold it to a few, oversaw and participated. She maintained morale, and was willing to change the final product when it didn’t work out as planned. Sounds like good training for life.

These three moments demonstrate how an immersion in nature, surrounded by peers, warm, fed and dry, allow for remarkable discoveries. Perhaps the Orienteer will be better able to draw an abstract conclusion in math class. Perhaps the Scientist will be able to test a hypothesis in chemistry. Perhaps the Inventor will be able to lead her peers in a musical ensemble. There is pressure as a parent to quantify a child’s learning, which is very difficult with the above examples. So a common question we all face as parents is how long do we allow our children to attend this type of non-formal academic programming before placing them in a more formal academic setting. When will they learn their numbers and their a-b-c’s? Many factors will play into this decision but to me the key initial consideration, the beginning question which should be raised is…….. what’s the rush?