Published by City Farmer, Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture

Involving Children In Children's Gardens
Farm In The City
St. Paul, Minnesota

A Paper Presented by

Anna Wasescha, Ph.D.
Anna Wasecha
Web Site: Farm in the City
1312 Dayton Avenue
St. Paul, Minnesota 55104
651-646-0034 (fax)

and Karla Ness, M.F.A.
Ness@luther.csp.edu
Professor of Art
Concordia University
275 North Syndicate Street
St. Paul, Minnesota 55104
651-641-8740 (work)

For the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Community Gardening Association
19 September 1998

Farm in the City is a joint project of the Lexington-Hamline Community Council and Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Located at Dunning Field, a City of St. Paul public park, Farm in the City is the size of an ordinary city lot: 40' x 120'. It is composed of twenty raised beds and two circular, brick-lined flat beds. There is one sign, 4'x8' in size, at the edge of the garden which identifies it, provides a phone number for more information, and has posted on it a map of the beds and other useful information. There are two picnic tables and two park benches for people to gather or rest within the confines of the garden. Farm in the City is not fenced.

Farm in the City came about as the result of a lengthy study of the uses of Dunning Field commissioned by the Lexington-Hamline Community Council and led by the Community Design Center of Minnesota. Dunning Field in the 1980's and early 1990's was virtually unused, except for its baseball diamonds and basketball court. The playground was poorly designed, in bad condition, and located next to the basketball court which attracted aggressive older players who intimidated families and children. Those players left a heavy residue of broken glass and cigarettes in the sand at the playground, deterring responsible parents from allowing their children to play there, even when basketball games were not in session. Most parents would not allow their children under the age of twelve to go to Dunning Field by themselves for anything other than scheduled baseball practices and games.

In addition to the Community Design Center, the Melpomene Institute helped the community study the use of Dunning Field by assessing how it served girls and women, since it appeared that there were very few of them at the park at any time of the year. The baseball leagues register 300 players a season and in an ordinary year, 290 of them are boys. The results of the Melpomene survey showed that after girls outgrew the play equipment, the only reason they went to Dunning was to watch boys play baseball or to supervise younger children at play. All of the senior citizens, without exception, said that they never used Dunning Field for any purpose whatsoever. They viewed Dunning as a facility for youth.

The neighborhood had lofty goals for Dunning Field. These included creating a space which would be welcoming to all residents of the neighborhood, no matter what their age, gender, or ability. In addition, it was hoped that Dunning Field could become an outdoor recreation destination for a greater portion of the year. The baseball season is approximately three months long, beginning in May and ending in July. Apart from a weather-dependent month or two of skating in mid-winter, Dunning Field was all but deserted for the remainder of the year. It was "all but" deserted because it continued to attract dice players, high school students skipping class, drug dealers and homeless people, all of whom found Dunning desirable precisely because for six to nine months out of the year there was really no one else using it.

Dunning Field lies between two educational institutions, a college and a high school, and is the largest expanse of green space in the Lexington-Hamline neighborhood. Members of the Community Council hoped that Dunning could be improved to the point that it would serve as a new "town square" uniting the educational and residential communities and providing a gathering space for community-building events. Dunning Field is also a natural environment. But as long as its primary use was as a baseball facility, it could not provide the elements necessary for a healthy environment for ordinary people, much less for birds, insects, mammals, trees and flowers - shelter, water, food, and constructive habitat.

A consideration of all of these issues led a group of community residents and Concordia faculty members to create Farm in the City in the spring of 1996. The mission of Farm in the City was to educate children about the environment, food, creativity, and the importance of diversity, in our communities and in the natural world. Over the last three years, Farm in the City has evolved from a laboratory site for teaching children to a complex community garden site which serves four purposes. It is a site for garden-based education for children ages 7 to 12. It provides several plots to individual gardeners for their own food production. It is a site for English as a Second Language instruction for the immigrant population in the neighborhood, and it contains one large bed set aside for food production for the local food shelf. This diversification of purpose serves several ends. First, it provides for a continuing presence of adults in the garden at all times of the day and during the week, throughout the entire growing season, which lasts from May through September. The summer program is only six weeks long, spanning from mid-June to the end of July. Secondly, and very importantly, it communicates to the children that there is a place for them in this gardening community along-side adults, not segregated from adults. Children can see that they have equal status in the garden with other kinds of gardeners.

There are two ways to consider how a community garden for children works: one is as a natural environment that is also a built environment, the other is as a program. These are interconnected of course, but in this case we would argue that function follows form rather than the other way around. Since this is counter-intuitive to ordinary design principles, where form theoretically follows function, and since it involves cross-generational reasoning, building a garden that is successful as a discovery and learning site for children is a challenge. The garden has to precede and anticipate the program. Once the initial design is built, as it was at Farm in the City, a feedback loop is set into place so that the program informs the design and so on into successive years. But the unavoidable reality about building a garden site is that the initial design will persist as the primary blueprint for the functioning of the garden. Tons of soil and compost are not easy to move once they are deposited in a collection of raised beds.

At Dunning Field, in the year before we built the Farm in the City site, we had the experience of designing a new playground. We learned a lot about playgrounds by thinking about how bad ours was, talking with children who used it, watching them use it, and looking at new playgrounds around town and in other parts of the country. Much of what we learned about playgrounds was useful to us in constructing Farm in the City because gardens are natural playgrounds for children and successful children's garden-based programs have a substantial element of play in them.

There are books and articles about children's playgrounds and outdoor space scattered across numerous disciplines, including landscape design, early education and child development, environmental sciences, sociology, and art. One of the most useful books we found is an extensive and highly valuable analysis of school grounds and the "hidden curriculum" embedded in them. The monograph is called Special Places; Special People, The hidden curriculum of school grounds, written by Wendy Titman, and published in England in 1994. School grounds, playgrounds in parks, and gardens designed for children are all examples of built environments in the outdoors dedicated to children and as such, Special Places is directly relevant to our Farm in the City project and to other gardens with a substantial component for children. This book relies heavily on a philosophical method of analyzing signs and symbols called semiotics. It also has a strong bias toward involving children in problem-solving and design work. It confronts the vexing problem of talking with children and eliciting candid responses rather than responses the child believes an adult wants to hear.

What is a hidden curriculum? The idea of a hidden curriculum surfaces in the higher education literature as well as in K-12 education. A hidden curriculum, as opposed to the one published in a catalog, is the one which actually operates in a school, or an organization, or, in this case in a playground or garden. Semiotics requires us to get behind the superficial and to decode the actual system. This is difficult enough for adults who are generally content with surface appeal, or inured to the appearance of the world around us. It must be even more difficult for children who are bombarded by advertising and television programming in which everything is reduced to two senses, sight and sound, and for which there is no more important meaning than that which is immediately available on the surface.

When they break away from the television set and video game, and get out of the school room, how do children see the three-dimensional, unpredictable outdoor world? The researchers in Special Places observed that children deconstructed large outdoor spaces into smaller elements that they could see offered them some opportunity for interaction. They would look out and see equipment, trees, birds, streets, bits and pieces of things, mud and dirt, broken glass, cars, fences and so on. They analyzed these elements in terms of what they meant for their own ability to do something, be someone, think thoughts and feel emotions.

Children also saw these elements as reflections on themselves, in the context of their own culture. For example, they instinctively divided elements into places for "people like them" or not. Certain things would spur children to feel curious or supported, elicit concern in them about how things were destroyed or cared for, or provide them with the emotional rush of a risk to take or a responsibility to shoulder. Their sense of place identity and self identity was interwoven: their self-esteem was indexed to the appearance of the open spaces in their neighborhoods and near their homes.

Most importantly for stewards of children's gardens, the children in this study overwhelmingly preferred natural environments to built environments in the outdoor world. Children prized:

• natural landscape with trees, flowers, and other things that grow,
• animals, ponds and other living things
• natural colour, diversity and change
• surfaces which they can use which 'don't hurt'*
• places and features to sit in, on, under, lean against, where they can find shelter and shade
• structures, equipment, and materials which can be changed, actually, or in their imagination (Special Places, p. 59)

* Playgrounds "hurt" and most children know it because they have had personal experience skinning their knees and elbows on concrete or asphalt, falling off a swing or a merry-go-round, or bumping their heads into the metal superstructures of the playground equipment.

We have tried to incorporate as many of these elements at Farm in the City as we could. We have trees, flowers and vegetables, shrubs and vines growing in the beds. They provide a steady supply of natural color, diversity and change in the garden. Finally, after three years of planting diverse plant populations at the Farm, we have begun to be able to attract birds to Dunning Field. We raised Monarch Butterfly larvae and, after they hatched, we released them in the garden. We have released ladybugs by the hundreds. And we planted butterfly and bee attracting plants to draw in insects.

Water in a children's garden is an essential element. The hose is a natural provider and the children love watering. In addition, we installed a bird bath this summer which was a product of our clay workshop with the children.

There are several surfaces which children can use at Farm in the City which won't hurt. These include wood chipped areas, open lawn, banks along the edge of the garden and shady areas under trees.

We worked hard on the idea of places and features to sit in, on, under, and find shelter. This year we added two picnic benches for lunches and workshops. Our two park benches remain, despite predictions that they would be stolen. We still have to rely very heavily on a grove of mature trees adjacent to the garden for dense shade on hot summer days. In an ideal world we would add arbors and modified lookout towers for the children to climb up on to and look out upon the garden.

The theory that nooks and crannies, dens and private structures would be significant features of an outdoor space was completely validated by this year's Farm in the City experience. We planted a stand of sunflowers in which children could get lost and one of our community gardeners created a cave made of chicken wire and bent steel bars draped in morning glories and wallpapered in sweetpeas and cucumbers. This den was a fabulous success at the garden. Nearly every child spent some time inside this cozy sheltered space enveloped by green leaves and flowers.

Structures in the garden are very important, and especially vertical structures. Farm in the City has one very tall television antenna on which we have grown climbing flowers which attract small birds and insects. In addition, we created several large structures made of a combination of bamboo poles and sticks. The bamboo pole structures were teepee formations installed by adults. Children helped to embroider sticks into the teepee forms to provide attachments for the climbing vines planted around the base of the structure.

The sticks all came from a final class project carried out by a sculpture class at Concordia University. There the requirement was that the students create a structure out of natural materials and install it in the garden. One student created a bicycle. Another made a gateway to the garden. One made a telescope. One made a rake and stand. All these sculptures were constructed by pegging piece of wood together and then wrapping the joints with twine. One or two of the twenty or so sculptures lasted as long as a week. The others were reduced to rubble by spring time winds and then scrounged for material to enhance the bamboo teepees. The temporary nature of the sculpture installations and the recycling of the materials were intentional, meaningful components of the experience, both for the college students and the children who participated in the summer program.

Research has found that the design of an environment determines not only whether children use it, but how. And while it is possible to use outdoor space designed for one use to another advantage, the data show that "the opportunities and constraints of the physical environment predict the majority of the predominant activity." (Titman, 101) A baseball field can be a place to play frisbee on occasion, but it will always be a baseball field, first scheduled for the regular and exclusive use of baseball teams and then available only for the most non-intrusive outdoor play, out of deference to the quality of the fields. For all intents and purposes, the three large baseball fields at Dunning are off limits to the children in the neighborhood and what remains are three play areas: the playground, the garden, and a small grove of trees and grass. That ratio of baseball fields to play areas is approximately 2/3 to 1/3.

Whether and how children use a space depends upon the level of their engagement with that space, along a continuum from complete absorption to utter boredom. The frequency with which the problem of boredom with outdoor spaces was mentioned in the Titman study troubled the researchers. Children's lifestyles, as reported by children, are highly passive and predictable: TV, bed, TV, school, TV, bed, TV, school. If, in the case of school grounds, the experience of the outside world is one of concrete and cyclone fencing, lack of shelter from wind and weather, no furniture, movable objects, or trace of the organic world, then boredom and the sense of anomie is intensified. An egregious example of this kind of boring playground design exists in the Lexington-Hamline neighborhood, and probably in every city neighborhood in this country. The playground at the local Catholic school is a parking lot. There is nothing on the parking lot except striping for cars and a four-square game. The only excitement in that entire playground is the snowbank that builds up as a result of plowing it out every Sunday during the winter for mass.

In our case at Dunning Field, baseball fields, which dominate the park, are prime examples of boring space. They are open expanses of grass and dirt, punctuated only by backstops, scoreboards, and the occasional bench for players and fans. This is in stark contrast to the kind of place which researchers find children most consistently, fervently enjoy: "ambiguous, hidden, wild, unkempt, leftover places." (Titman, 108)

It is out of boredom that deviant behavior is born. Inappropriate, destructive, anti-social behavior among children and teens is the bane of contemporary urban life. And in the Lexington-Hamline neighborhood, we have a real concern about the girls who grow up here without opportunities for positive physical fitness and recreation at their neighborhood park. And as cities become more intensely urban and less natural or wild, this problem of limited engaging outdoor space will only escalate unless policy makers, child advocates, stewards of public space, and educators take up the responsibility for designing environments for children which promote social cohesion, connections with the natural world, and healthy communities. Indeed, socially progressive urban policy makers today emphasize containing urban expansion and developing all available land within city limits for housing, commerce, and other activities. In his article on the "need for nature" in children, Robin C. Moore (1997) roundly criticizes "new urbanists" who champion urban densification while failing to consider the legitimate and compelling needs of the children who live in those cities and who need a connection with the natural world. Battles over land use will dominate the conversations in American cities for the next few decades because of the clash between the principles of new urbanism and a growing population of city residents who prize green space, locally grown organic food, outdoor recreation, clean air, and easy access to park-like amenities such as rivers, creeks, lakes, bike trails, and prairies. One movement is a product of the other.

Robin Moore focuses on children and the environment and holds that the spaces and lifestyles that we create for children are critical. "Children (he says) are the evolutionary bridge, continuously rebuilding the connection between present and future states of planet Earth."(Moore, 213) Moore, who is the president of the International Association for the Child's Right to Play and a Professor of Landscape Architecture at North Caroline State University, argues that

For healthy, prosocial community development, the best strategy is to combine creative play leadership with the stimulus of a natural environment over which children have control. This was the genesis of the adventure playground movement launched in Denmark over 50 years ago.... It combines two realms: a space dedicated to children's free-play interaction with each other and the basic substance of the natural world (earth, fire, water, plants, and animals), and nurturing, facilitative relationships with trained professional play leaders working in a nonformal educational setting. (Moore, 210-211)

The 1998 Farm in the City Summer Program attempted to operate fully in these two realms. Our space included the garden as described above, surrounding park areas including the playground, three art studios at Concordia University and the college art gallery set aside for world music using instruments from the natural world (gourds, shells, sticks, and whatnots). During this six week program we also spent one day a week on field trips to sites chosen to enhance our curriculum. One field trip was along the railway tracks that make up the western boundary of our neighborhood. This is the only truly wild corridor in the neighborhood and it is currently being considered for redevelopment as an enhanced roadway connecting the southern suburbs to the central cities. Another trip was to Swede Hollow, a reclaimed, and still wild, park in St. Paul on the site of what once was a squatter's village. Another was to Mears Park, a downtown St. Paul park in which there is a moving stream landscaped with huge boulders surrounded by mature trees forming a canopy over the grounds.

Farm in the City ran from Monday through Thursday for six weeks, beginning on June 15, 1998. The day began at 10:00 a.m. and ended at 3:00 p.m. There were two hour long activity periods in the morning, two in the afternoon, and an hour lunch break. Lunch was provided by the City of St. Paul Public School District. Because this program was aimed at inner city youth, we sought and received the support of a number of foundations and public agencies to subsidize the cost of this program. The tuition was $25.00 a week or $100 for all six weeks. To accommodate families with siblings, we capped family tuition at $150, no matter how many children were enrolled. Anyone asking for financial assistance was provided what they said they needed, without the use of any formal needs analysis.

Our participants were children ages seven to twelve. There were sixty registrants, of whom roughly two thirds were girls and one third was boys. In addition to these fifty-nine children, we also provided programming to thirty-five summer participants in another program called ArtsUs. ArtsUs children participated in the horticulture instruction, the music work, art studio, and quilting studio three afternoons a week for four weeks. In exchange our Farm in the City participants attended their Juneteenth production, listened to their featured storytellers once a week, and worked with a Liberian drummer and dancer.

Our teachers included an elementary teacher interested in horticulture and wild crafting, a music teacher schooled in world music and native instrumentation, a folk and peace dance instructor who also taught art, an environmental artist who was assisted by a clay artist, a Liberian drum and dance instructor who encouraged the children to think about natural rhythms and dance as a reflection of life and its cycles, a quilt artist, who taught children how to create quilt squares that tell their garden stories, an environmentalist who introduced composting and vermiculture, and a poet, whose time was spent helping the children express in words and figurative language their experience in the garden.

Service learning students from Concordia University also worked on the Farm in the City project. Community Health majors researched Health modules for us and created lesson plans for the summer. Another Health major worked full-time as a program assistant, supervising children. One Art major served as a full-time instructor in the Farm in the City program. Another assisted with the program, intending to become a teacher next year. In addition, as a helpful context for the Farm in the City program, all the students in two Principles of Biology class conducted field studies at Dunning. These students cataloged and identified all the trees, conducted bird and mammal sightings, investigated insects, analyzed the soil, and measured weather indicators at the park. This field research was very helpful because it established a baseline of data from which we can measure improvements as the program continues.

Teen leaders were an important component of the Farm in the City program. Each group of children, divided by age, was accompanied by a teen leader who stayed with them all day long. Children relied upon the teen leader for affective support, for hand holding, lap sitting, and verbal affirmation. The teen leaders themselves learned valuable skills both in training sessions offered at the beginning of the summer and at weekly debriefing sessions, and in the day to day work and troubleshooting involved in accompanying a group of children from one activity to the next.

Our curriculum was interdisciplinary - in part because the world is interdisciplinary and in part because we wanted to model making connections for the children who participated in Farm in the City. Teachers met every Monday morning and every Thursday afternoon to plan the week and then debrief. Where possible, teachers worked in teams. The final culminating event of the Farm in the City program was a Council of All Beings which bridged all the work overseen by all the teachers. At the Farm in the City Council, children processed across Dunning Field wearing masks they had made to represent an element or a being in the natural world. One child was the ozone layer. Another was an otter. Another was the sun. They formed a circle and then one by one stood up to address the group to say what it was they needed to be healthy in this world. Afterward they danced and sang and listened to their poetry.

One of the important outcomes of the Council of All Beings was having the children identify some being or element they cared deeply about and then giving voice to this care in a group. Throughout Titman's study of children and the hidden curriculum of schoolyards there is a continuing discussion about the element of "care" in a community. Everyone knows that children instinctively care about warm puppies and purring kittens. But children are also very aware of the environment generally, of trees, birds, rain, and how important it is to take care of the earth. The breadth of elements and beings our children selected to represent in the Council of All Beings was real testimony to both their diverse environmental attachments and the universality of their empathy and concern for the natural world.

Children also read the details about how a community does or does not care for them in the way that playgrounds, parks, and gardens are designed and maintained. What they read influences their sense of self esteem and their inclination to give "care" back. This basic exchange of love, for self and other, is the essential building block of a healthy community. The same building block is the cornerstone of growing food for oneself and sharing food with others. In this way community gardening with children is an intensive jump start on building strong communities.

One way to summarize our experience of involving children in children's gardens at Farm in the City is to describe some of the lessons we learned in 1998:

1. Children's involvement in a children's garden ascends along a "ladder of participation." Weeding, laying wood chips, building raised beds and wheeling heavy loads of compost and soil are not much play, particularly after about ten minutes of steady work. We relied heavily upon Sentence to Service workers, non-violent offenders who are sentenced to hours of community service, to do the heavy work of maintaining our garden.

   If the bottom rung on the ladder of participation is weeding, the top of the ladder is most definitely picking - harvesting flowers or vegetables. Near the top are activities such as discovery (what's in the garden?), watering the garden with a hose and spray nozzle, sitting in the garden caves and sunflower forest, planting seeds, and following butterflies through the garden. Most children loved the mud and dirt inherent in gardening, however some young girls disliked worms and getting dirty.

2. The more vertical structures, furniture, dens and caves, sculptures, and other creative garden amenities, the better for the children and their involvement. The children loved spaces in the garden that were just for them and fanciful items of any kind. They also loved unusual plants: monstrously large sunflowers, celosia, which look like small velvet brains, broom corn and so on. Overall, children loved relating to shapes, colors, and imaginative constructions. This excitement was true for inert objects like the steel bar and chicken wire cave as well as with the brain plants. They wanted to look, touch, name, and enjoy all the bits and pieces in the garden. This was how they assessed what they could be, do, think and feel.

3. We were lucky not to have a lot of vandalism in our garden. We credit that on being in a very public place and having a lot of neighborhood children involved in the project. Even so, the children were extremely proprietary about the plants that they watered and observed and they expressed real exasperation if someone else watered or picked one of their plants. The extent to which the children identified with the site was not static. Early in the summer, the children were detached from the plants and somewhat mystified by all the ideas the teachers presented to them that were related to the garden. By the end of the summer the children were at home in the garden, identified with the plants, and had sharpened for themselves a real sense of environmental stewardship and connection with the natural world.

4. Flexibility in lesson plans is critical. The heat was sometimes horribly oppressive. Sometimes the children had no interest in an activity and it was necessary to substitute something else. Sometimes the lesson plans was aimed too high. We provided each child with a journal and hoped that every day they would write in it. The seven year olds were not able to write easily and so the teen leaders shifted them toward drawing pictures and would occasionally write down what the children wanted entered into the journal. On the other end of the spectrum, the eleven and twelve year olds were able to sustain their interest in a topic for more than fifty minutes and activities for them were often cut short.

5. Because so much of what we did at Farm in the City involved art and extended science projects (such as raising Monarch butterflies), our one hour time blocks were not always workable. Our time slots need to be based on the activity as well as the age of the group.

6. Food was such a critical subject matter of our work in the garden and yet we did not provide a sufficient number of healthy snacks and beverages for the children. Our original plan was to provide freshly baked bread in the afternoon just as we dismissed the groups. We provided water in coolers on an intermittent basis and there was a drinking fountain at the park and in the college classroom building. We realized after we had started our program that many of our children had not eaten breakfast and that they arrived at our program hungry and thirsty. The summer heat was also more intense than we anticipated and we could have done a much better job of providing cold water and ice for the children. The lunches provided by the City of St. Paul Schools were universally detested by the children. Often they would eat nothing or simply parts of a cookie or piece of fruit. Ironically, these lunches are prepared to meet federal guidelines for healthy nutrition for children. We need to rethink how we provide food.

7. Of all the art work, the clay workshop and the papier mache were the most successful. These required longer than one hour periods to set up, work, and then cleanup. We would increase our emphasis on environmental art next year. In addition, we now see how artists and children can work alongside one another on parallel tracks. For example, the children made clay whistles, tiles with leaf impressions, and wind chime elements while they worked as a group on a larger project for installation in the garden. Together, the children and artists built a traditional pigeon house which feeds birds, provides them with a roost, and acts as a compost system for the bird waste. They also built a ceramic bird bath.

8. The horticulture component of the program is consistently interesting to the children, whether it be plant science, insect breeding, or vermiculture. The children were eager to learn how to identify plants and to learn about the environment, including the principles of organic farming.

9. Our collaboration with Concordia University and our reliance on their faculty, service learning students, and facilities was key to the success of our program. Garden programs need sheltered spaces to work on rain days and indoor spaces to create and protect more ambitious projects for the garden. Without the art studios, we could not have built the clay pigeon house or bird bath for the garden.

10. We scheduled an open house at the garden halfway through the program and the Council of All Beings on the last day. The number of parents who attended the evening open house and the daytime Council of All Beings was higher than anyone would ever have predicted. We had very enthusiastic parents who were keen to be involved with their children at the garden and very pleased with the program their children was enrolled in for the summer.

Why is all this work so important? There is an increasing concern about dramatic changes in children's lifestyles and what that portends for our society. In the last three decades, features of urban life have driven more and more children indoors and into passive activity. According to Moore, these features include traffic dangers, fear of violent crime and abduction (called the Bogeyman Syndrome), a lack of open green space, a curtailment of free time for children, changes in the family systems and the rising number of latchkey children, television and video games, air conditioning, and the commercialization of play.

At the same time, all the research suggests that natural environments help children develop in ways that they simply cannot in virtual environments, classrooms, and indoors. Their physical health declines, their alienation and rootlessness increases, and their consciousness narrows. Moore calls on all of us to "create neighborhood landscapes that offer safe, unrestricted places where childhood and its natural inheritance can be reunited and flourish together." (Moore, 212)

Community gardens with components for children are exactly these sorts of places. Farm in the City is just one kind of approach to addressing this challenge. Each garden solution needs to be sensitive to the community context, mindful of the assets of the community, and focused on meeting the needs of children in ways that are meaningful to them.

Sources:

Special Places; Special People, The hidden curriculum of school grounds, Wendy Titman, World Wide Fund for Nature/Learning through Landscapes, 1994. Distributed in North America by: The Green Brick Road, C/o 8 Dumas Court, Don Mills, Ontario, M3A, 2N2, Canada, 1-800-477-2665

"The need for nature: a childhood right," Robin C. Moore, Social Justice, Fall 1997 v24 n3 p203.

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