Our FREE Guide to Winter is jam packed with tips, tricks and inspiration to help your whole family get the most out of winter—and do it your way. Find our Winter 2022 Gear Guide with favorite gear from across our Tinkergarten community, too!
Our FREE Guide to Winter is jam packed with tips, tricks and inspiration to help your whole family get the most out of winter—and do it your way. Find our Winter 2022 Gear Guide with favorite gear from across our Tinkergarten community, too!
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Sunday, June 19, 2022 will be the 157th anniversary of #Juneteenth—an annual recognition of the moment when 250,000 enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, were told they were free on June 19, 1865 – 2.5 years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
We echo both the celebrations and reverent remembrances of Juneteenth, and we ask everyone in our community who doesn’t yet know the history to learn more, with us, about why it’s an important holiday, an integral part of our country’s history, and a reminder for us to continue working towards equity for all.
We are also excited to announce that Tinkergarten is partnering with Outdoor Afro – the nation’s leading, cutting-edge network that celebrates and inspires Black connections and leadership in nature – on an important initiative that engages all people in honoring Juneteenth.
The Guide
Spend 2.5 Hours In Nature:
Tinkergarten is aligning with Outdoor Afro to recognize what freedom in America means to each of us, and you can participate too by doing two things:
Visit a place in nature you’re comfortable with (a nearby park, forest, beach, or even your backyard) on June 19 for 2.5 hours to reflect on the 2.5 years freedom was denied for 250,000 enslaved people in Texas and, with that context in mind, reflect on the question, "What does freedom mean to me?"
Share your experience after the 2.5 hours in nature with us by visiting outdoorafro.org/Juneteenth to submit your reflections for public view.
Outdoor Afro is developing a portal where you can submit your written reflection and they will aggregate, organize and publish the reflections for the world to read our collective narratives and relationships to nature.
To be part of this event, please register for this annual event outdoorafro.org/Juneteenth by simply clicking the “REGISTER HERE” button on the page. We'd love to have each of our efforts contribute to the goal of 50,000 people honoring Juneteenth together in this way.
Our Tinkergarten employee team will also be joining Outdoor Afro by taking 2.5 hours of our work day the week following Juneteenth to go outdoors and focus on honoring Juneteenth, remembering and reflecting. We look forward to sharing our reflections as part of this important project.
Read more about the history and timely importance of Juneteenth in this article by P.R. Lockhart for Vox or in this course from Khan Academy.
About Outdoor Afro
Outdoor Afro is an incredible, national organization and network that celebrates and inspires Black connections and leadership in nature. What started as a kitchen table blog by Founder and CEO Rue Mapp in 2009 has since grown into a cutting-edge nationwide network with 100-plus volunteer leaders in 60 cities. “Where Black people and nature meet,” Outdoor Afro reconnects Black people with the outdoors through outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.
Connect with Outdoor Afro on social media @outdoorafro to see the network in action!
Why is this activity great for kids?
University of Pittsburgh historian Alaina Roberts explains that, "Juneteenth gave people freedom but it also gave them hope, something they had been longing for for a long time. Telling this particular story offers an opportunity for kids to know how important it was for people who had been treated so badly for so long to begin to experience a whole new way of life, to be truly free, and that’s always something to celebrate." If we want to learn from the past and forge a better future for out children, we grown ups need to remember and honor that change is ongoing and takes time and unending commitment, and that our history includes deeply woeful wrongs. Helping children come to understand as they grow will help them to make sure fewer such wrongs are part of their future.
Try a Free Class
Two class formats: try a free In-Person session (where and when available) or try Tinkergarten Anywhere, our on-demand product available anytime.
In either format, a certified Tinkergarten Leader will teach a Tinkergarten lesson and inspire your kids to play.
Sample the additional activities and resources families get each week to keep kids learning outside at home.
People use critical thinking skills to gather information, evaluate it, screen out distractions and think for themselves. These skills help us identify which knowledge to trust and how to use new and old knowledge together to decide what to believe or do. People also use these skills to develop arguments, make decisions, identify flaws in reasoning and to solve problems.
Also referred to as “higher-level thinking,” critical thinking draws on many other skills that matter (e.g. focus/self control, communication, making connections, and even empathy). Kids won’t fully develop critical thinking until adolescence or even adulthood, but remarkably there is lots that you can do to help your kids build its foundation during preschool and early school ages.
How do little kids build a base for such a complicated set of skills? A key building block to critical thinking is the ability to develop theories about the world and to adjust your theories as new information becomes available. Kids can practice this as they attempt to solve mysteries or actively wonder about why things are as they are. As a family, the more you ask questions, make predictions and allow kids to take active part in discovering the answers to their questions, the stronger you make their foundation for critical thinking. As kids grow out of the 3-to 5-year-olds' freewheeling relationship with reality, you can also train them to question information and see the inconsistencies or flaws in certain ways of thinking.
Why does it matter?
In a world that is increasingly saturated with media messages and where information comes from a wide range of sources that differ in quality, critical thinking is more important than ever. Kids need this skill in order to be informed and empowered consumers, to either suggest or evaluate new solutions to complicated problems, to make decisions about our society and its governance, and to form the beliefs that guide their personal and professional lives.
Naturalist
Category:
Thinking Skills
What is a Naturalist?
The oldest and simplest definition, “student of plants and animals,” dates back to 1600. The term has evolved over time, it's importance changing as the values of dominant culture have changed. 400 years after that old definition, Howard Gardner, the paradigm-shifting education theorist, added “naturalist” to his list of “multiple intelligences.” Gardner challenged the notion that intelligence is a single entity that results from a single capability. Instead, he recognizes eight types of intelligence, all of which enable individuals to think, solve problems or to create things of value. To Gardner, the Naturalist intelligence enables human beings to recognize, categorize and draw upon certain features of the environment.
A true naturalist has not simply Googled and learned the names of plants, animals, rocks, etc. Rather, he or she has had direct experience with them, coming to know about them and using all senses to develop this intelligence. A naturalist also has a reverence for nature, valuing and caring for living things from the smallest mite to the tallest tree. A naturalist comes to not only knowing the creatures and features of his or her environment, but treasuring them in thought and action.
Why does it matter?
In the process of becoming a naturalist, children become stewards of nature, a connection that is associated with a range of benefits, including greater emotional well-being, physical health and sensory development (not to mention the benefits to nature itself!). In a world in which primary experience of nature is being replaced by the limited, directed stimulation of electronic media, kids senses are being dulled and many believe their depth of both their interest in and capacity to understand complicated phenomena are being eroded. To contrast, the naturalist learns about the key features of their natural environment by using all of his senses and be interpreting open-ended and ever-changing stimuli.
Active Lifestyle
Category:
Body Skills
What is an Active Lifestyle?
At the end of the day, there is nothing more important than our kids’ health. From our perspective, children cannot enjoy good health without an active lifestyle that incorporates regular, physical activity as well as time spent in nature. And, we can only influence how they use their time for a short part of their lives. If we really want to ensure their wellness for the long haul, we need to get our kids hooked on being active outdoors.
Two bits of good news: little kids naturally want to be physically active, and they love to be outdoors. So, the challenge we face is how to make active time outdoors a priority in our lives and how to teach our kids to do the same. Understandably, this is increasingly challenging in a culture that imposes so many schedules and structures around kids time. And it is all the more important when kids spend the majority of their waking hours indoors, staring at a screen, or living in communities in which the green spaces are fewer and more restricted than ever before.
Why does it matter?
Research in the past 25 years has confirmed a link between physical activity that takes place outdoors and positive health outcomes. Also, it has drawn an association between an indoor, sedentary lifestyle and negative health consequences. For young children, time to play, ramble and explore outdoors leads to the most extensive and lasting benefits—more than adult-led, structured outdoor activities like organized sports.
Perhaps the two most common issues in children’s health to which a lack of outdoor, physical activity contribute are childhood obesity and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]). Beyond the millions of overweight children, obesity rates have doubled for children (ages 6-11) and tripled for adolescents (ages 12-19) in just two decades. The number of children diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD continues to rise, and ADHD results in significant impairment to children socially and academically.
Studies have shown that lifestyles learned as children are much more likely to stay with a person into adulthood. For example, 70% of teens who are obese grow up to be obese adults. On the flip side, if physical activities and time spent outdoors are a family priority, they will provide children and parents with a strong foundation for a lifetime of health.
Age: 0 to 8+
Time: 1 hour+
Materials: 2.5 hours outside
