15 Hilariously Inappropriate Playgrounds - Oddee.com

15 Hilariously Inappropriate Playgrounds - Oddee.com

I do so love it when playground equipment manufacturers attempt to imitate nature....and get it ssssoooo wrong.

Warning - do not follow the link if you are easily offended by language, awkward photos or thoughtless equipment design. I have a sneaking suspicion that the "grater slide" is Photoshop'ed

BBC News - Lack of contact with nature 'increasing allergies'

BBC News - Lack of contact with nature 'increasing allergies'


Isn't it amazing, you start to post on a theme and all of a sudden there are studies flooding every media source, confirming what you (and most of the population) already know. Studies are great. What else is great, rocks, rocks are great... but that can be another post. Read on McDuff.


Excerpts below -the full article can be read from the link above

"A lack of exposure to a "natural environment" could be resulting in more urban dwellers developing allergies and asthma, research has suggested. Finnish scientists say certain bacteria, shown to be beneficial for human health, are found in greater abundance in non-urban surroundings. The microbiota play an important role in the development and maintenance of the immune system, they add.
The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


"There are microbes everywhere, including in the built environment, but the composition is different between natural environments and human-built areas," explained co-author Ilkka Hanski from the University of Helsinki. "The microbiota in natural environments is more beneficial for us," he told BBC News.

The team collected samples from 118 teenagers in eastern Finland, and found that those living on farms or near forests had more diverse bacteria on their skin, and also displayed lower allergen sensitivity. "They are important for us because they promote microbiota… that are important for the normal development and maintenance of the immune system," Dr Hanski observed.

We know that if you live more near green spaces, and you are from a deprived urban population, you are more likely to be healthier” Urbanisation can be seen as a lost opportunity for many people to interact with the natural environment and its biodiversity, including the microbial communities.While it was not possible to reverse the global trend of urbanisation, he said that there were a number of options.


"Apart from reserving natural areas outside of urban areas, I think it is important to develop city planning that includes green spaces, green belts and green infrastructure," Dr Hanski suggested.

..................Another recent study also illustrated a link between the lack of green spaces and higher stress levels among people living in urban areas described as deprived. The study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning measured levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress, found in residents' saliva. "The stress patterns revealed by these cortisol samples were related to the amount of green space around people's homes," explained co-author Catharine Ward Thompson....."We were actually surprised by the strong relationship between the two," she told BBC News. ...."We know that if you live near more green spaces, and you are from a deprived urban population, you are more likely to be healthier," she observed......"If you lived within 10 minutes of a park, then you were twice as likely to achieve the recommended minimum amount of physical activity."

'Symphony Of The Soil': New Documentary Connects Soil Health To Human Health

'Symphony Of The Soil': New Documentary Connects Soil Health To Human Health:

Hot on the heels of yesterdays post, I came across this great piece by Lynne Peeples. Somewhere in the near past we traded away our relationship with nature (and all the health benefits that it entails) for convenience.

The joke being that neither interacting with nature, playing in the earth, growing your own food, cooking your own food (not that processed muck) was ever inconvenient. The concept that something is "convenient for you" is (another) one of those gigantic lies that agri-corporations use to get you to buy and consume things that any animal with functioning senses would beat a hasty retreat from.

Excerpts below -the full article can be read from the link above

"Jack Algiere has no qualms about letting his kids eat their veggies straight out of the ground from the fields and greenhouses he manages in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.

He knows the rich, organic soil will provide Sedge and Ojiah with delicious, nutrient-rich food. Not to mention a possible boost to their immune systems.

His sons have their favorites. "Carrots are up there and consumed after a brush with the shirt sleeve. But spinach in winter seems to be the prize," said Algiere, the farm manager at Stone Barns Center For Food and Agriculture. "With most greens, they prefer to graze -- no hands -- rather than pick."

Perhaps most importantly, Algiere knows that toxic fertilizers and pesticides will not have touched the carrots or spinach, and therefore can't pose any risks to his sons' health.

"Thanks to our improved understanding of the dynamics of soil, the luster of chemical agriculture has worn off," Algiere said. He once worked farmland the conventional way, but said he has since learned that nature really does know best when it comes to warding off unwanted weeds and insects, and feeding a plant what it needs to thrive.

Nature's secret: healthy soil, composed of billions of tiny creatures that essentially become a plant's immune and digestive systems.

But despite the way Algiere manages Stone Barns, many people are acting as soil spoilers, according to a new documentary called "Symphony of the Soil." Our chemical dependencies are stripping soil of its life-giving duties and turning it into lifeless dirt, the film says. We've destroyed half the world's topsoil in the last 50 years, and a quarter of what's left is degraded. Experts in the film suggest that this loss is contributing to a range of today's ills: flooding, droughts, toxic algae blooms, contaminated drinking water, cancer, developmental problems, antibiotic-resistant infections, obesity and more.

"The connection between healthy soil and healthy people is so obvious," said Deborah Koons Garcia, director and producer of the film, which screened last weekend at Stone Barns.

So, when and how did we lose sight of such a vital relationship? And can we find it again?

.....More than 10,000 chemicals are currently registered for agricultural use in the U.S., Paul Hepperly, who was research director of the nonprofit Rodale Institute during filming, says in the documentary. ......In most cases, the health effects of these chemicals or mixtures of chemicals remain unknown. But science is slowly starting to catch up, ...and prenatal or early childhood exposures appear capable of causing everything from birth defects to cancer to infertility. New research suggests that even tiny amounts of a toxic chemical can prove harmful to a developing child.

More information about Symphony Of The Soil can be found at http://www.symphonyofthesoil.com/ along with some extremely moving vignettes or grace notes from the film. I have embedded one below I find particularly pertinent.

Sticks and dirt

I was visiting a centre yesterday and was approached by a child who was eager to tell me his newest joke. "What's long, brown and sticky?" he asked with a huge grin. "I don't know, what is long, brown and sticky?" I replied......"A stick", he said and returned to the digging patch where he'd been industriously building. It's an old joke, I know (you're suppose to think, oh no, not poo!)  but it seemed to be his first and I didn't have the heart to rob him of the punchline.

The exchange and his play/work in the digging patch got me thinking about words and how we use them, stick and sticky, dirt and dirty. Sticks aren't necessarily sticky and dirt isn't usually dirty, not in the sense we use the word. However words, especially generalised terms like dirty, can have a profound effect on how children learn to regard things. For instance we commonly use the term dirt to describe what is in fact soil.

Soil (that has not been contaminated), is 45% minerals (sand, silt, clay), 25% water, 25% air, and 5% organic material, both live (bacterium, worms, ants etc.) and dead (leaves, grass, bacterium, worms, ants etc.).  Ah ha.... I hear you say, bacteria are bad, everyone knows that. Not necessarily. There are about two thousand species of bacteria identified, however the ones generally found in (uncontaminated) soil primarily assit in the decomposition process helping release carbon dioxide and essential nutrients into the air and soil. Bacteria found in soil can actually have an antidepressant effect and early exposure is thought to be beneficial in helping build resistance to allergies and immune related diseases.


When children are allowed to interact with their natural environment (or in generalised parlance "get dirty") they're learning, discovering and experiencing more than could ever be contained in a structured lesson. 

       

And yes, soil that is or has become contaminated can contain pathogenic or " harmful" bacteria. These can be dealt with by:

1. Ensuring that the play area is free of  contaminants.  In centres where I design a playground and a digging patch or sandpit are included, my specifications for construction and fill are respectively, free draining and clean. Maintenance of either should be regular, and is quick and easy, details about the current urban fears (and their remedies) can be found here, Toxoplasmosis, Meliodosis and Silicosis. 
2. Ensuring that the children follow a routine for cleaning themselves (simple hand washing) before they eat,
3. Ensuring that if a child is sick, wherein their immune system is compromised, they refrain from playing in any potentially hazardous environments (see point one) until they are healthy again and then ensuring that you and they follow a clean routine (see point two) after play.   
4. In respect to children actually getting dirt on them, don't dress them in designer togs that you're going to worry may get stained or provide a change of clothes and a plastic bag for the used items,
5. Babies can, do and will place items in their mouths, they're exploring the taste, smell and tactile sensations. If you're worried about them doing this in a natural environment - supervise them.

All in all, if you provide a safe natural environment for children to play in and explore, adequate unobtrusive supervision of their play and remedial hygiene routines you can be assured that the benefits of their play will always outweigh any perceived risks. 

“People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.”

Plato, 428 BC-348 BC


 

Storytime comes at a cost

Storytime comes at a cost


Excerpts below -the full article can be read from the link above
This just makes me sad....and angry, no one is that busy. And bugger NAPLAN !

"Parents once considered reading their children a bedtime story and attending free storytime at the local library sufficient for developing early literacy skills.

But there is a burgeoning industry charging for reading classes for preschoolers, tapping into parents' desire to give their child a head start in life.

Berkelouw Books opened the doors to its purpose-built The Reading Studio above its Leichhardt store last week. Developed in consultation with the Institute of Early Childhood at Macquarie University, the one-hour weekly classes are run by a university-qualified early childhood teacher and cost $25 a session.

The ABC has been running its online Reading Eggs program for more than three years, charging $79.95 for an annual subscription and promising to educate children to a year one standard of reading. One million children have registered.

''Reading is the most common area parents are willing to spend money in before their children start school, because they want them to be school-ready,'' Blake eLearning educational publisher Katy Pike, responsible for ABC Reading Eggs, said.

The Reading Studio co-founder David Berkelouw said he had observed how children who had attended storytime at his bookstores in the past 15 years grew up to become independent readers. ''I thought there has to be more in this than what we're doing,'' he said.

As schoolchildren prepare to sit the NAPLAN tests, an associate professor at the Macquarie Institute, Jane Torr, said children learnt ''an enormous amount'' by reading and talking about books from a very young age.

''Studies show children's pre-school vocabularies relate to their literacy achievement [later in life],'' Professor Torr said. She advised on the development of The Reading Studio program.

But why would parents pay someone else to be their child's storyteller, when the bedtime story is such a childhood ritual? Professor Torr said working parents were often too tired or busy at the end of the day to provide an enriching bedtime story experience.

''They [parents] often don't have the time and the focus to sit down and say 'let's really talk about this book', especially if you've got more than one child.''

Noella Mackenzie, a lecturer in literacy studies at Charles Sturt University, argues that parents who outsource reading mistakenly believe pre-schoolers need formal instruction and discount their own abilities as teachers.
''They're undervaluing their own role,'' she said. ''Parents are amazing instinctive teachers of their own children: they teach their children how to speak, how to eat, how to do their buttons up, they do all of these instinctively.''
She argues parents should not be concerned with having children reading before they reach school. Rather they should lay the foundations for formal literacy education by exposing children to the patterns of speech and narrative. ''They need to learn what stories are all about, beginnings middles and ends the process of narrative; they learn that just from exposure,'' she says.

''[Having] an ear for the sounds within words, that comes from being read to, being sung to, having games like rhyming games, nursery rhymes, poems - that hones their development of memory.''

Another neglected aspect of preschool literacy, Dr Mackenzie says, is writing. ''[Reading and writing] go hand in hand and quite a lot of what children learn from print text they learn from exploring their own writing and scribbling.''

........ ''Research shows having a passive experience with the child listening and the adult reading is good, but it's better if the child is an active participant during the narrative.''

COLUMN ONE: At an urban L.A. school, nature grows — and test scores too - latimes.com

COLUMN ONE: At an urban L.A. school, nature grows — and test scores too - latimes.com

Excerpts below -the full article can be read from the link above 

"Biological diversity does not come easily near the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Hoover Street.
The neighborhood just west of downtown is one of the most crowded in Los Angeles County, with 25,352 people per square mile. It's chock-full of buildings and has lots of pavement, little landscaping and many economically disadvantaged families.

In that setting, Leo Politi Elementary School wanted only to make a dreary corner of campus more inviting to its 817 students. Workers ripped out 5,000 square feet of concrete and Bermuda grass three years ago and planted native flora. What happened next was unforeseen. It was remarkable.

The plants attracted insects, which attracted birds, which attracted students, who, fascinated by the nature unfolding before them, learned so much that their test scores in science rose sixfold. In the words of Leo Politi's delighted principal, Brad Rumble, "We've gone from the basement to the penthouse in science test scores."

....Three years ago, the school's standardized test scores in science for fifth-graders showed that 9% were proficient and none were advanced. Last spring, 53% of fifth-graders tested as proficient or advanced.

.....In partnership with Los Angeles Audubon, Leo Politi in 2008 became one of the first elementary schools in the city to apply for and win "schoolyard habitat" and partner's grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

With $18,000 from the agency, and volunteer assistance from environmental students at Dorsey High School, Leo Politi removed the concrete and grass from the forlorn corner of campus. Dorsey students wielded rakes and shovels and helped select and plant bushes, flowers and trees, including six live oaks that now shade a slope Rumble calls "our oak highlands."

Nature responded quickly to the clumps of rye grass, owl's clover and waist-high thickets of white sage and wildflowers: California poppies, California wild roses, tidytips and island snapdragons.

"First to arrive were insects — lady beetles, butterflies and dragonflies — almost as if they were lying in wait," Rumble said. "They were followed by birds that feed on them." At that point, students were hooked. "Questions about why some birds flocked to one plant and not another led to discussions about soil composition and water cycles, weather patterns and seasons, avian migration and the tilt of the Earth in its orbit around the sun," Rumble said.

......To education experts, the concept of project-based learning is nothing new. "If students are actively engaged in a real-world project — whether it be working on a car engine, designing a dress or cultivating a garden — it's going to turbo-charge classroom curriculum," said Guilbert Hentschke, a professor of education at USC's Rossier School of Education. "Most educators intuitively or professionally understand this," Hentschke added. "And most would love to do it, but they don't always have the time, money, staff or space."

.......The benefits are much greater than pure science, said Robert Jeffers, lead arts and humanities teacher at Dorsey and Los Angeles County teacher of the year in 2010.

At Leo Politi, the garden has "instilled a profound sense of responsibility and awareness of nature," Jeffers said. "Now these kids can tell the difference between a crow and a raven, which requires cognitive skills of understanding subtleties and nuances important throughout life."

.....The garden and Rhieman's class are springboards for older students who receive weekly after-school workshop lessons in science illustration taught by Stacey Vigallon, director of interpretation for L.A. Audubon.

That five-week class concluded with students learning to mix up to 10 shades of green with colored pencils. Among them was Jesus Olvera, 11, who labored over a rendering of a burrowing owl. No sooner did he complete a meticulous sketch of the bird's eyes than he erased it and started over.

........Since the garden was planted, students have documented and illustrated more than 25 species of birds, including the meadowlark that dropped in around Thanksgiving, an ash-throated flycatcher that visits each autumn and a white-crowned sparrow spotted last Sunday."

It takes a forest, a field and a stream to raise a child | The Japan Times Online

It takes a forest, a field and a stream to raise a child | The Japan Times Online

Excerpts below -the full article can be read from the link above

In 1996, back when the present U.S. Secretary of State was the first lady, Hillary Rodham-Clinton published a book titled "It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us," which popularized an old African proverb — "It takes a village to raise a child."...... But beyond politics, social scientists know, and most parents admit, that child-rearing is a mysterious combination of nature and nurture. Both influence a child's development to varying degrees, with the interplay of genes and environment determining who we become. Clearly the village plays a role.

Today, however, with over half of the world's population living in cities, more and more young people are missing out on a crucial dimension of childhood development. Not the village or the genes, but the forests: a combination of nature and nurture, call it self-nurturing in the natural environment.

The lack of forests, fields and streams for urban kids is one part of the problem, and the spread of seductive technologies is another. According to a recent survey in the United States by California-based nonprofit the Kaiser Family Foundation (which focuses on national healthcare issues and the U.S. role in global health policymaking), in a typical day "8- to 18-year-olds devote an average of 7 hours 38 minutes to using entertainment media (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking,' they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours 45 minutes' worth of media content into those 7½ hours." (For full survey results, visitwww.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm.)

......Whether we like it or not, such technologies and their offspring are here to stay. The problem is that each hour a child spends absorbed in entertainment media is one hour not spent in nature.

......Like various other similar outdoors programs for children — including ones my Nature page colleague C.W. Nicol organizes with his Afan Woodland Trust in Nagano Prefecture — these camps give children an opportunity for self-nurturing in a supportive environment set in natural surroundings. Unlike Nic's projects for mainly disadvantaged Japanese children and young Tohoku survivors, though, these are conducted in English.

......."Modern kids don't get enough time outdoors in contact with nature, and far less than previous generations, and this affects everything from intellectual and emotional development to obesity and physical fitness," Paddock continues. "As a kid, I only went to one overnight camp, but I was out in the woods around our neighborhood in the daytime, catching fireflies at night, sledding and making snow forts in winter. We weren't closely supervised, so we got to learn our own limits and invent our own play.

....."Another thread is that we are providing camps for a growing number of children from orphanages," he explains, including a special camp in Kurihara, Miyagi Prefecture, for Tohoku Prefecture orphans. "For these kids, all of the other camp benefits are true — along with what we believe to be great therapeutic potential to be found in nature."

Paddock cares deeply about kids and nature, and he hopes that nurturing campers who love nature will encourage those children to conserve Japan's environment when they get older. "We have to know something before we can love it, and we have to love it before we want to protect it," he says.

....."Our job at EA is first of all to help kids really know nature and the outdoors. Then, and only then, can they begin to love it. Once they've begun to experience the beauty, the fun and the mysteries for themselves, then love of the natural world has a hope of arising from within. And once that love, that personal relationship, arises, then the instinct to protect what they love will follow," he explains.

"If even a fraction of the kids we meet at camp develop a personal relationship with the outdoor world and have a respect for nature that comes from knowing it directly, maybe we'll have made a difference," Paddock says. "Turning kids on to how cool nature is, and how much enjoyment there is to be found in nature, we're laying the foundation for them to understand, care about — and act upon— the environmental issues they'll learn about as other educators contribute to their development."