National Wildlife Federation's "Green Hour"

Everything parents can do to get their children reconnected to nature from home backyard adventures to attendance in local nature camps is important. Ancestral Knowledge is dedicated to helping you with first rate nature demonstrations, classes, programs, and camps in the Mid-Atlantic Region.

There are also many tools out there that help parents to maintain their children's newly found interest in nature in between our scheduled events. One such tool is the National Wildlife Federation Greenhour.org. It was created to give parents and caregivers the information, tools, and inspiration to get their kids -- and themselves -- outside.

As a society, we are raising the first generation of Americans to grow up disconnected from nature. That's the bad news.

The good news is that the steps that got us here are easily traced, and the way to work toward reversing them is clear.

Most importantly, by giving our children a "Green Hour" a day -- a bit of time for unstructured play and interaction with the natural world -- we can set them on the path toward physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

The National Wildlife Federation recommends that parents give their kids a "Green Hour" every day, a time for unstructured play and interaction with the natural world. This can take place in a garden, a backyard, the park down the street, or any place that provides safe and accessible green spaces where children can learn and play.

Ancestral Knowledge can help make up those Green Hours your children missed for whatever reason. Our kids camps and classes disconnect them from the electronic screen and reconnect them to nature. Register soon.

Business Leaders Reconnect Children to Nature

Are you in the Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC business community and want to help reconnect Children to nature? Wondering what you can do besides supporting regional and national campaigns to connect children to nature?

Help your community in a more targeted effort by supporting Ancestral Knowledge, such as funding a bus service for under-budgeted school nature field trips hosted by AK, funding under-served children to attend AK Camps or, even, sponsoring an AK event at a local school. Become a financial sponsor of AK as we work to connect children and parents to nature.

You can sponsor AK outdoor classrooms for schools. You can underwrite AK to build a nature center with locally provided nature programs for vulnerable children, or help AK join with a land trust organization to protect open space—and build AK family nature centers on that land.

For your own employees, business employers can sponsor on-site nature-based child-care centers, as well as nature retreats for employees and their families. Businesses can also help to fund research, e.g., to gather knowledge on how best to create child/nature friendly homes and neighborhoods. Such research could focus on the relationship between nature experience and worker productivity, health, reduced absenteeism, and so forth.

In any event, get involved in your community.

Contact Ancestral Knowledge.

Americans Spending Less Time in Nature

From NPR's 'Morning Edition':

'Every year, a smaller percentage of Americans are fishing, camping or engaging in other nature-based activities. Since the late 1980s, the percentage of Americans taking part in such activities has declined at slightly more than 1 percent a year. The total effect [...] is down 18 to 25 percent from peak levels.

Mark Barrow, a Virginia Tech environmental historian, says the changes described in this paper are potentially historic. He says it's worth remembering that Americans have changed their attitudes toward nature many times over the centuries: It has been seen as evil, something to be tamed, a source of wealth, and as what Barrows calls a romantic playground.

In that view, Barrow says, experiencing wilderness was "connecting with something divine, something that was primal and part of who you were as a culture."

But Barrow says this study makes him wonder whether a new era may be dawning, one in which the wild is a place best seen at zoos or on plasma-screen TVs. "It clearly seems to be the case that we seem to not need to experience the natural world in the ways that we did previously," Barrow says.

The new study also says Americans might not be the only people changing in this way. Numbers from Japan show similar declines in things like park visits.

This evidence of losing touch with nature does not bode well for the Earth's future or children ever wanting to learn any of the sciences like biology, geology, or botany. Ancestral Knowledge is dedicated to bringing the "wildness" experience back to where it belongs in the American Psyche by teaching our children to see the wonders in nature and fostering that spark of curiosity.

Ancestral Knowledge Battles Against Nature Deficit Disorder

Our main goal here at Ancestral Knowledge is to bring the inner-city youth back to nature through programs like the ancient skills demonstrations we have held at the Washington D.C.'s Capital Hill Day School and other youth focused programs. In addition, we help maintain connections to nature with adults through our partnership with the Wilderness Survival program a Georgetown University. And, have provided experiences to adults who have lost touch with their childhood memories of the outdoors and want to regain that healthy relationship.

Our youth and adult programs are helping reduce Nature Deficit Disorder. We have seen some of the results with the kids we have continual contact with and it is encouraging.

Nature Deficit Disorder?

Almost two years ago the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, hosted the National Dialogue on Children and Nature Conference. The focus of the conference was on saving our children from nature deficit disorder. You may have heard of this phrase before, it is the title of a book by Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. Louv in his acclaimed book argues that today’s children have lost their connection to the natural world because of the addictive character that the modern world of television, computers and video games has on our children.

Hear Richard Louv talk about his book at NPR.

Some of the actions, solutions, and opportunities that the conference participants suggested are still useful, but we have not seen much progress in making them reality other than limited research on the benefits of exposing children to nature.

Health-related actions: Conduct research on the benefits of exposing children to nature instead of pharmaceuticals; incorporate the health benefits of nature into medical and nursing school curricula; and encourage pediatricians to prescribe nature time for stress reduction and as an antidote to child obesity.

Education actions: Assure that every school utilizes nearby; offer students in-nature time during teacher in-service days; create new partnerships between schools, farms, ranches and public parks; establish a national Nature Bee; and ask each student to be personally responsible for one living thing.

Societal actions: Create a “Take a Child to Nature” day; persuade AARP to create a nature-mentor program; establish a child-nature impact assessment for all built environments; and engage religious organizations.

Locally, AK has been fruitful in establishing at least one of the possible solutions--ancient skills educational and nature programs--to local schools and universities. Parents can have a voice too by calling teachers, school boards, and congressional representatives to encourage more funding and focus on getting our children out in nature and, of course, signing up their children for outdoor experiences.

Let's work together for a better future.

Urban Abo Pottery

Ancestral Knowledge collaborates with Joe's Movement Emporium, another area non-profit, to teach local kids primitive skills. We work with 30+ kids (ages 5-14) every Friday at Joe's teaching ancient arts like primitive pottery. Interestingly, the kids just loved sticking their hands into the wet clay and squeezing it through their fingers.

The first day we brought clay that had been sitting by a warm corn burning stove, the second day the clay had been left out in the cold. Not expecting there experience to differ from the previous session, they had a delayed shock from its cold temperature. It was a treat to see their faces and hear their expressions after their senses kicked in and recognized that something was different.

After a week of letting the moisture leave the pots, we heated them in a fire in the Joe's gravel parking lot. Due to open air fire restrictions inside the beltway we used a barrel to fire the pots in.

We had an initial 90% success rate in firing the pots; not many broke or exploded. However, this success rate reduced to about 50% after handing the fired pots over to their young proud owners, many dropping them in excitement.

Everyone in the program did a great job making pots, beads and figurines.

Woods Wisdom Found in the Dirt

More and more research suggests that letting children play in the dirt is good for them. Contact with certain germs and parasites found in the great out of doors early in life, especially those found in the soil can be healthy for building sound functioning immune systems. Some researchers suggest that time spent playing outdoors in the dirt and mud, which is filled with mycobacteria, serves a role in protecting children from allergic and autoimmune diseases as well as acting as an antidepressant.

There is a higher occurrence of asthma in inner city kids that are more likely to play on concrete than in the dirt, and a low incidence of allergies in kids who live in rural areas like on farms where contact with soil is much more common. Hygiene hypothesis theory blames the modern preoccupation with cleanliness for contributing to the recent rise in the incidence of asthma and allergies.

Recent research conducted at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, suggest that exposure to some bacteria found in soils induced the brain to make more serotonin, our "happy" chemical. Yes, dirt makes you happy... amazing.

Although some bacteria can cause disease, not all strains of bacteria are dangerous. For example, a considerable number of bacteria within our intestinal tract are vital to healthy existence. This doesn’t mean that eating dirt would be healthy though some children relish a daily diet of the stuff. Only superficial contact with our largest organ, the skin, is sufficient for building that healthy immune system and brain function.

Get your kids out in nature to give them a healthy immune system and more happiness. Schedule them for a Ancestral Knowledge Day Camp.

30 Jun – 3 Jul – Woods Wise Spring Break Camp (Greenbelt, MD) ages 8-14

7-11 Jul – Woods Wise Day Camp (Greenbelt, MD) ages 8-14

7-11 Jul – Wisdom of the Woods Day Camp (Greenbelt, MD) ages 8-14

21-25 Jul – Woods Wise Day Camp (Greenbelt, MD) ages 8-14

21-25 Jul – Wisdom of the Woods Day Camp (Greenbelt, MD) ages 8-14

28 Jul – 1 Aug – Woods Wise Day Camp (Greenbelt, MD) ages 8-14

28 Jul – 1 Aug – Wisdom of the Woods Day Camp (Greenbelt, MD) ages 8-14