Teach Children About Nature With Play Motifs

David Sobel’s Design Principles for Place-Based Education

Aug 27, 2009 Susan Caplan

David Sobel's observations on the way children play can inspire educators to introduce activities that encourage children to want to learn.

While parents and teachers see certain behaviors in children at play, educator David Sobel classified those actions into seven play themes. Sobel suggests that the way children play gives them a meaningful connection to the natural world. Instead of learning facts from books, children can have experiences in nature that encourages them to discover more about their own community. After creating these local connections, children can then make meaningful associations to the global environment.

Place-Based Education

In his book Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators [Stenhouse Publishers, 2008], Sobel tells accounts of educators who have linked lessons in writing, reading, math, and science with time spent in nature.

Sobel suggests that by incorporating the way children connect to their world that they will “move naturally move toward a desire to learn”. Some of this type of education involves happenstance. The discovery of a turtle laying eggs in the schoolyard may encourage the children to pretend to be turtles, learn more about turtles in general, discover that some turtles in their area are endangered, and then, raise money to give toward turtle protection.

Sobel’s Design Principles for Educators

The principles are based on the way children play – pretending, building forts, and creating treasure maps. The principles are not developmental, instead, Sobel says they are “the weft of the fabric; they run through all the developmental stages.” The seven design principles are adventure, fantasy and imagination, animal allies, maps and paths, special places, small worlds, and hunting and gathering.

When an educator uses one, several, or all of these play motifs in creating lesson plans, learning becomes an organic extension of the way children explore their world. It is impossible to involve this type of learning for every aspect of the school day. However, while studying a unit, the teacher could include activities beyond worksheets and a simple craft.

Play Motifs

Adventure involves children physically connecting with their world, using their bodies and senses to walk, climb over rocks, dig in the dirt, etc.

Fantasy and Imagination for younger children may involve puppet shows and costumes while older children need situations that “create simulations in which students can live the challenges rather than just study them.”

Animal Allies involves children pretending to be animals before (or while) studying facts about that creature. This doesn’t just include kindergarteners growling like bears. Older children learning about polar bears and the melting ice caps can figure out a to-scale glacier measured over the play yard and then draw chalk outlines showing how the ice has melted over the past 20 years. By pretending to be bears looking for food and dens in their shrinking world, the facts make more sense.

Maps and Paths encourage children to make maps, figure out shortcuts, walk routes they’ve never explored, and follow a map to a secret event.

A Special Place could be a fort built of downed branches or blankets and chairs. “Especially between ages eight and eleven, children like to find and create places where they can hide away and retreat into their own found or constructed places.” (Sobel, 38)

Small Worlds are miniature special places, expanding on a child’s love of constructing tiny worlds. In the classroom, abstract ideas about the past become concrete as students construct a model of what their town looked like 100 years ago.

Hunting and Gathering can involve scavenger hunts – for information as well as objects. The request to collect 15 different leaves may make children aware of the variety of trees in their area, encouraging them to flip through field guides to discover what lives in their area.

David Sobel’s principles allow educators to connect the way children play and find out about their world with how they can learn in the classroom.

The copyright of the article Teach Children About Nature With Play Motifs in Teacher Tips/Training is owned by Susan Caplan. Permission to republish Teach Children About Nature With Play Motifs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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