Teach Your Kid's About Nature's Electronic Network!

Incredible Symbiotic Relationships Connecting Plant Communities

Okay, sounds good, but you may have to educate yourself first. And nothing teaches kids better than fun cartoons. Yet many adults may even need a little encouragement by use of animation to get a full understanding of what goes on under the ground in the natural world, like this pic below which in real life you may not be able to explain in simple attention grabbing language or terms which will capture and hold that child's short attention span.

These relationships Allow Plants to absorb Water & Nutrients by over 200%

The Australian government to the rescue through it's "Australia National Botanica Garden's website and an animated "A Pictures Says a Thousand Word" explanation of just how interconnected the biological underground really is under the Earth. 


It is definitely a challenge these days to get young people interested in anything like a garden, let alone going on nature treks. The competition is huge and you're outnumbered, what with things like computer gaming, cell phones, I-Pads, Smart Phones, Blackberries, CD Players with Headphones, Flatscreen Televisions, etc. When I was a kid we spent most of our time outdoors. We dreamed up our own adventures using our minds, since there wasn't some industry out there doing it for us, not that what existed then wasn't trying. During the 1950s - 60s kids were involved in all manner of conservation glub programs and summer kamps to teach kids how fun and adventurous nature could really be. Most of those well known programs and clubs are just about extinct and the sad state of the planet's natural world shows it.

Primary fault for this lack of interest in gardening or nature and responsiblity for guiding your kids is on you the parent. Unfortunately this world runs on a pursuit of materialistic excesses mentality. Family structure no longer allows for close families any longer since both parents often work to provide material goods well beyond what are really the necessary basics. Those electronic gadgets unfortunately have been used as convenient babysitters. Hence if you want to develope any interest at all in many of the oldtime wholesome activities which were normal to family life decades ago, you've got your work cut out for you. 

Then go ahead and take advantage then of those technologies - ideas and use them in constructive ways. Here's the weblink to that Australian site and maybe it will give you some creative ideas for teaching your kids through some type of cartoony clipart media.

  "Australian National Botanic Gardens - Mycorrhiza"

A Thousand Words 



Take advantage of some other electronic technologies like Videos. Kids love videos, but when it comes to something educational, only if it's short videos. The video clips are short and they  match their young short attention spans. I ran across an educational nature website for teaching kids nature.  Click on the videos link. One of my favourite is about those "Banana Slugs" from the pacific northwest of North America. My wife purchased a tape of children's songs for our son Jared dealing with the subject of nature and those slugs had a song made about them.


"The Vista 360° Program  Environmental Science Magnet School Program"

http://pves-nvusd-ca.schoolloop.com/program


Enjoy and good luck with those distracted kids. Oh - and in the process, you too may even learn a thing or two that's valuable too!


Further reading and ideas on how you can teach kids to appreciate the microbiology that works under the ground. Great Link:

The Microbe Zoo: digital learning center for Microbial Ecology 

Some Updates here on this one:

Children often act the way a scientist is supposed to. Toddlers are able to express basic aspects of scientific understanding: finding cause and effect by experimental method. These were the findings of Alison Gopnick who performed experiments with children ay play and became convinced that, contrary to popular beliefs that children act irrationally and chaotically, the basics of scientific reasoning are present in their brains even at a young age. 

"Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications"

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1623.abstract

Absrtact:

"New theoretical ideas and empirical research show 

that very young children’s learning and thinking are 

strikingly similar to much learning and thinking in 

science. Preschoolers test hypotheses against data 

and make causal inferences; they learn from 

statistics and informal experimentation, and from 

watching and listening to others. The mathematical 

framework of probabilistic models and Bayesian 

inference can describe this learning in precise ways. 

These discoveries have implications for early 

childhood education and policy. In particular, they 

suggest both that early childhood experience is 

extremely important and that the trend toward more 

structured and academic early childhood programs is  

misguided."

Full Article:

What looks like play may really be a science experiment

Child’s play is science. [“Playing Doctors” by Frederick

Daniel Hardy (1827–1911); image: Stapleton

Collection/Corbis]

Schematic representation of the

 ping-pong ball experiment. The

 experimenter showed the infants a

 box full of white and red balls. Then

 she closed her eyes and randomly

 took some balls from the box and

 put them in another small bin. If the 

sample was truly random, then the 

distribution of balls in the bin should

 match the distribution of the balls in the box. Infants saw a 

sample that either matched or did not match the distribution, 

and they looked longer at the non-matching sample. In a

 control condition, infants saw just the same sequence of 

events, but the experimenter took the balls out of her pocket

rather than taking them from the box, and the looking-time

 difference disappeared.

The blicket detector 

experiment. Children saw 

that the machine did not

 activate when B alone was

 placed on it, but did 

activate when A was placed

 on it and continued to do so

 when B was added to A.

 Then they were asked to make the machine stop. Given this 

evidence, the correct causal interpretation is that A alone 

activates the machine, and the children should act on A and

 not B.

The main responsibility for a child's learning and development is PARENTS, not the State. Deepen your child's learning ability by allowing their curiosity to work for them, not against. 

Enjoy!