Further to your article in Wednesday’s paper (Feb.19), I would like to congratulate the teachers of Ecole des Deux Monde for their wonderful article on Feb. 12, telling us about their outdoor forest project to prevent a nature deficit disorder in their K-1 children.
Not only did the article give us insight into the need for outdoor forest play.
Back to the nature-deficit idea. How well I remember as a child wondering how my in-town friends filled their lives with excitement when there were no cows for them to milk and herd, no pigs to feed, no eggs to collect, or hay to sleep on in the hayloft. My city cousins came to visit and the first thing they did was trip off to the pigsty to see if there were any young piglets to pick up and cuddle, not something we ever did. They were starved for closeness to nature while we would get excited about a trip into town or to the big city once or twice a year.
Growing up within nature’s full spectrum can only be a good thing. As Noam Chomsky so ably says, “Ordinary people who do creative things can help change the world”, I say thank you to the teachers, especially Vachon and Dallaire, at EDM for putting their creative idea into practice.
Claire Hunston
