Outdoor Trips Inspire Children and Parents

When Neighborhood House, a social-services organization for immigrant families in Seattle,

was picking field-trip destinations for a new nature program for preschool students last year, it had two main criteria: The trips couldn’t take students more than 10 miles away and the places had to be accessible by foot or city bus.

Neighborhood House had the time to go farther. It even had the money, from a special grant, to take private transportation. But a key goal of the program, along with giving their small charges a taste of the outdoors, was to encourage the children’s parents to revisit the field-trip spots with their families.

“A majority of the parents come from rural environments in their home countries, where they had nature-bound childhoods,” says Karol Swenson, Neighborhood House’s education manager. “Then they come here and everything is urban and alien; they have no way of sharing their knowledge and expertise with their children.”

Getting Adults to Explore

Neighborhood House, she says, wanted to orient the adults to their environs, and give them the opportunity to share their childhood traditions of play and exploration with their kids. It’s an interesting twist to the many new programs starting around the country to introduce young kids to the natural world.

Through its Head Start program — and with the help of money from Hooked on Nature, a California group that supports efforts to get families outdoors, Neighborhood House ran 18 trips last year to local parks, woods, and the beach.

For the kids — about 175 kids age 3 to 5 who participate in the Head Start program — the trips were magical journeys of discovery, Ms. Swenson says, as they listened to birds or collected shells. And for their parents, she says, the trips were eye-opening and emboldening.

One father who grew up on Africa’s northeast coast, in Somalia, had no idea he lived so close to a huge body of salt water, until he visited Lincoln Park, a wooded area in West Seattle on the Puget Sound.

A mother from Vietnam, often reserved, became so animated during a beach field trip that many of the kids were following her around as she identified and described different kinds of shells, critters, and seaweed.

“She was electrified by her recognition, this I-know-where-I-am kind of feeling, and the kids responded to her enthusiasm and expertise,” says Ms. Swenson. “Her own 4-year-old was glowing.”

Lack of Money

Neighborhood House did not run the program this year because of lack of money — last year the group spent a little less than $7,000 on 18 trips. However, many teachers, who had set aside money for more typical field trips to museums and other sites, chose to take their classes on outdoor exploration trips instead. The organization has applied to a local foundation for money to run the outdoor trips again next school year.

Neighborhood House found through a survey that more than a third of its Head Start families had repeated an excursion they first made with their classes last year.

“That is what it is all about,” Ms. Swenson says, “giving parents the information and the inspiration to go back to these special places with their kids.”