Read This Before Your Child Takes Lessons from Nature School

Nowadays, there are lots of school options. Each school has its own approach, teaching method, and values. Today, many schools are applying active learning approach, less emphasize on the exam, and stimulate the curiosity of children in order to be able to develop their potentials. One type of school that much talked about recently is nature school. What is this nature school anyway?

Nature school, like its name, offers different learning method to other schools in general. Nature school uses nature as the primary medium of learning. The child will have more outdoor than indoor activities.

In the concept of nature school education, there are three functions of nature, i.e.:

• Nature as the study room
• Nature as the medium and teaching materials
• Nature as the learning object

For example, when a child studying plants, he will directly see the types and variations of the plants, not just from reading a book. With this kind of learning method, a child is expected to be more motivated to learn and not easily get bored.

Learning with nature as the medium will develop a child’s natural intelligence. Natural intelligence is an intelligence to recognize, differ, reveal, and categorize what is seen from nature or environment. This way, a child will appreciate more the environment.

Each child can study in the nature school. But it is better if you have found out the learning style of your children before making decision. For a child with visual learning style, a learning method by using moving objects such as those used in nature school can be challenging. You can find your child’s learning style, by observing his daily activities.

When new things are introduced, does your child quickly learn from pictures and read like those with visual learning style? Or he listens a lot like those with auditory learning style? Or he shows kinesthetic learning style where he is more interested to interact with the learning objects.

Because of many outdoor activities, nature school requires spacious area. Therefore, usually this kind of school is not located in the city center. Also, currently there are not many nature school, so that the number of enthusiasts and capacity do not match. In terms of cost, the school of budget is relatively large because they have to maintain all the media used as learning materials.

Like other schools, nature school also have their positive and negative sides. Most importantly, your child should be interested in the learning methods to be able to learn effectively in the school.