Naturally Kids’ mission is to provide meaningful opportunities for Minnesota children with disabilities to enhance their lives and build competence by exploring and experiencing the natural world.

The program is founded on the belief that a childhood spent in nature is a childhood well spent. Lazy days watching clouds and active hours exploring woods and streams foster creativity, imagination, curiosity, wonder, understanding, self-confidence, and competence for all children.

 

Unfortunately, many children--especially those with disabilities--are increasingly detached from the earth, wind, water, plants, and animals that make up our world. There’s a term for this disconnect: nature-deficit disorder. Research shows it is contributing to childhood obesity, learning disabilities, ADHD, and developmental delays.

 

Why does this program put the emphasis on kids with disabilities? Nature is the ultimate place of inclusion. Everyone is welcome and everyone belongs—just as they are. In fact, it’s the perfect place to learn just how cool differences are.

In addition, connecting with nature offers substantial social, emotional, health, and academic benefits.

• It’s powerful therapy for some disabilities, including depression and ADHD (per evidence-based research)
• It promotes socializing, inclusion, and even career exploration
• It offers an opportunity to use multiple intelligences:
  • Naturalist (“nature smart”)
  • Linguistic
  • Logical-mathematical
  • Spatial
  • Bodily-kinesthetic
  • Musical
  • Interpersonal
  • Intrapersonal
• Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making (per evidence-based research)
• Childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity (anecdotal evidence)

 

Naturally Kids also offers families an opportunity to connect with other families of children with disabilities. Siblings are invited to observe each month’s presentation and enjoy the outdoors experience, but the program is for children with disabilities. Just as a whole family might go to one of its children’s soccer games, only the child who is on the team is on the field.

 

Naturally Kids is a project created for the Minnesota Master Naturalist Program, which is sponsored by the University of Minnesota Extension Service and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.