Give your kids the gift of daylight.

In order to maintain healthy attention kids need three things that are often in short supply in schools — fresh air, large muscle movement, and daylight. One of the easiest to fix, in many schools, is daylight.

How Will You Redesign Your School Over The Next Six Months?

Offline, our learners enjoy fresh air, daylight, large muscle movement, and the freedom to stim and playThere is nothing more human than play. Humans were designed to learn in play. In fact, nearly all mammals evolved this way.Play’s Power At our learning space, we provide learners fresh… More.

Petrichor and Play

🌳 Immediate Contact with the Outdoors

school should go further than providing space, light, and air: “It should be a place where the child can feel that he belongs, where he can move in freedom, and where he can enjoy immediate contact with the outdoors.”

The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids

Children must be challenged educationally, however the wisdom emanating from the building itself is explicit: children deserve and flourish in an atmosphere of love, community, mutual respect, beauty and a connectivity to nature.

The school building as third teacher

A covered porch – allowing learning to stay outdoors in any weather – was essential.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

⛰ A Connection to Place

When children have a storied relationship with a place, when they know its history and understand the flora and fauna that call it home, they care.

Take It Outside. Exploring Place-Based Learning and Risk | by Abe Moore | Medium

I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother’s back. But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

According to Barry Lopez, a framework for developing a lasting connection to place should go beyond function or beauty. Lopez posits three qualities are required, paying intimate attention, creating a storied relationship rather than a purely sensory awarenessAcceptance means training mental health service providers to look at autism and other disabilities as a part of a person’s identity, rather than a problem that needs to be fixed. Acceptance… More, and engaging in reciprocal ethical unity.

Take It Outside. Exploring Place-Based Learning and Risk | by Abe Moore | Medium

It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

For Aboriginal peoples, country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human — all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self.

Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living in Country.

Msit No'kmaq
For all the life
The trees
The air
This is how we end our prayer
Way ha
Way ha hey ho

Msit No’kmaq by Morgan Toney

Msit No’kmaq means “All My Relations” in Mi’kmaq.
Msit No’kmaq aims to support people in reconnecting with themselves, each other, the land, waters, and all beings…

Our Story — Msit no’kmaq

Taking care of nature, and nature taking care of us in return, is the greatest teaching my father has taught me. Indeed, nature protects us as long as we protect nature. This is something Western science has failed to understand or explain. Settler colonialism introduced ideologies and beliefs that nature is meant to provide us resources, to meet our needs, without requiring us to protect it as well. Nature has been described as an infinite sink, and this is what has led to overfishing, overharvesting, and essentially environmental degradation. Environmental degradation is the destruction that continues to occur in our environments. It is why our environment continues to face severe droughts, wildfires, and other natural disasters and our ecosystems continue to decline.

As long as we continue to remove ourselves from nature, nature will not be able to protect us from environmental impacts.

Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science

It is important to reemphasize that Indigenous knowledge and teachings are described as place based. This means that every Indigenous tribe, pueblo, or community has their own unique ways of thinking and managing their landscapes. Place based for Indigenous peoples goes more in depth than just an enclosed natural place. It broadens to the landscape, and this more holisticSystems Thinking Is Not Indigenous Holistic ThinkingIndigenous holistic thinking is not systems thinking because many Indigenous peoples and communities do not separate their world or landscapes into “systems” in the… More lens is embedded among Indigenous knowledge systems.

Everything is interconnected, even during our environmental and climate justice movements. We do not just advocate for our rights and natural resources, as it should be if we were applying this systems thinking into our ways of knowing. We also advocate for language, genderDue both to their ability to denaturalize social norms and to their neurological differences, autistic individuals can offer novel insights into gender as a social process. Examining gender from an… More, spirituality, and everything else that is integral to our identity as Indigenous peoples. Everything is interconnected ultimately to our environment through our cultural values and ways of knowing.

Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science

You’re either gonna change your values, or you’re not gonna survive.

Chief Oren Lyons

🛝 Play

There is nothing more human than play. 

Humans were designed to learn in play. In fact, nearly all mammals evolved this way.

Play’s Power

Children have evolved to learn mainly through thousands of hours of play. Play is a developmental powerhouse in a way no lesson plan or curriculum could be. 

The more we learn about the brain and body the more clear this has become. When we play and use our bodies we form connections between our neurons that can serve us for a lifetime. Play forms the basis of our social and emotional well-being. It teaches us to take risks and be okay with failure. It builds our abilities as problem solvers. And possibly most important this generation’s children, it bolsters their creativity and ability to generate novel ideas.  

Play’s Power

“There’s a lot of things that kids built,” he explains, looking around at the playground. “It’s not adults doing work; it’s kids doing work!”

Children need an environment with “the opportunity to engage in open, free play where they’re allowed to self-organize,” he adds. “It’s really a central part of being human and developing into competent adulthood.”

Play Hard, Live Free: Where Wild Play Still Rules : NPR Ed : NPR

The research is clear, but truthJustice, equality, fairness, mercy, longsuffering, Work, Passion, knowledge, and above all else, Truth. Those are my primary emotions.Very Grand Emotions: How Autistics and Neurotypicals Experience Emotions Differently » NeuroClastic https://youtu.be/uPRa6G2a48E… More be told I feel no need to justify allowing my students to play. Simply the fact that they so clearly want to play is sufficient for me. The joy it brings is more than enough.

We have only one childhood. When what should be a play-filled period of life is gone, it is indeed ‘lost’. And that’s the loss I am worried about.

So when we talk about restoring humanity in education, I can’t think of a better place to start than in play, especially with our youngest learners.

Play’s Power

👋 Stimming

Sometimes I need a mind/body break. I need to be aloneAloneness is a characteristic that many creatives embrace and yearn for. Being alone is anything but lonely. Reading, writing, and creating art all demand a personal space where one can… More, I need to be in my head, and I need to stim. I stim by flapping my arms and clapping my hands while pacing. Stimming is a necessary part of sensory regulation. Stimming helps keep me below meltdown threshold. “Stimming is a natural behavior that can improve emotional regulation and prevent meltdowns in stressful situations.” “Let them stim! Some parents want help extinguishing their child’s self-stimulatory behaviors, whether it’s hand-flapping, toe-walking, or any number of other “stimmy” things autistic kids do. Most of this concern comes from a fear of social stigma. Self-stimulatory behaviors, however, are soothing, relaxing, and even joy-inducing. They help kids cope during times of stress or uncertainty. You can help your kids by encouraging parents to understand what these behaviors are and how they help.“

Please proceed with what you are doing when I take a sensory break. I will observe from the edgesFor me this space of radical openness is a margin a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at… More and rejoin you when I am able.

We’re Autistic. Here’s what We’d like you to know.

We inherited a “mind on the hoof,” in the phrase of philosopher Andy Clark—but in today’s classrooms and offices, the vigorous clatter of hoofs has come to an eerie halt.

What this attitude overlooks is that the capacity to regulate our attention and our behavior is a limited resource, and some of it is used up by suppressing the very natural urge to move.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

“Sitting quietly,” the researchers conclude, “is not necessarily the best condition for learning in school.”

The continual small movements we make when standing as opposed to sitting—shifting our weight from one leg to another, allowing our arms to move more freely—constitute what researchers call “low-intensity” activity. As slight as these movements appear, they have a marked effect on our physiology:

It’s not only that such activity-permissive setups relieve us of the duty to monitor and control our inclination to move; they also allow us to fine-tune our level of physiological arousal. Such variable stimulation may be especially important for young people with attention deficit disorders. The brains of kids with ADHDADHD or what I prefer to call Kinetic Cognitive Style (KCS) is another good example. (Nick Walker coined this alternative term.) The name ADHD implies that Kinetics like me have… More appear to be chronically under-aroused; in order to muster the mental resources needed to tackle a difficult assignment, they may tap their fingers, jiggle their legs, or bounce in their seats. They move as a means of increasing their arousal—not unlike the way adults down a cup of coffee in order feel more alert.

She found that more intense physical movement was associated with better cognitive performance on the task. The more the children moved, in other words, the more effectively they were able to think. Parents and teachers often believe they have to get kids to stop moving around before they can focus and get down to work, Schweitzer notes; a more constructive approach would be to allow kids to move around so that they can focus.

Even among those without an ADHD diagnosis, the amount of stimulation required to maintain optimal alertness varies from person to person. Indeed, it may differ for the same individual over the course of a day. We have at our disposal a flexible and sensitive mechanism for making the necessary adjustments: fidgeting. At times we may use small rhythmic movements to calm our anxiety and allow us to focus; at other moments, we may drum our fingers or tap our feet to stave off drowsiness, or toy with an object like a pen or a paperclip as we ponder a difficult concept. All of these activities, and many others, were submitted to researcher Katherine Isbister after she put out a call on social media for descriptions of people’s favorite “fidget objects” and how they used them.

Her research and that of others suggests that fidgeting can extend our minds in several ways beyond simply modulating our arousal. The playful nature of these movements may induce in us a mildly positive mood state, of the kind that has been linked to more flexible and creative thinking. Alternatively, their mindless and repetitive character may occupy just enough mental bandwidth to keep our minds from wandering from the job at hand. One study found that people who were directed to doodle while carrying out a boring listening task remembered 29 percent more information than people who did not doodle, likely because the latter group had let their attention slip away entirely.

Perhaps most intriguing is Isbister’s theory that fidgeting can supply us with a range of sensory experiences entirely missing from our arid encounters with screen and keyboard. “Today’s digital devices tend to be smooth, hard, and sleek,” she writes, while the fidget objects she crowdsourced exhibit “a wide range of textures, from the smoothness of a stone to the roughness of a walnut shell to the tackiness of cellophane tape.” The words contributors used to describe their favored objects were vivid: such articles were “crinkly,” “squishy,” “clicky-clackety”; with them they could “scrunch,” “squeeze,” “twirl,” “roll,” and “rub.” It’s as if we use fidgeting to remind ourselves that we are more than just a brain—that we have a body, too, replete with rich capacities for feeling and acting. Thinking while moving brings the full range of our faculties into play.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

The tight connection between thinking and moving is a legacy of our species’s evolutionary history.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

🧠 Neuroception and Sensory Load

This makes seemingly benign noises a threat to my well-being and quite possibly real physical danger to my physiology. Benign noises become painful, and if left unchecked, enough to trigger a system reaction reserved for severe dangers. This is what days can become like on a regular basis for myself and many on the spectrum.

“Let me stick a hot poker in your hand, ok? Now I want you to remain calm.”

That is the real rub of the experience of sensory meltdowns.

Autistic Traits and Experiences in “Love and Mercy” The Brian Wilson Story – The Peripheral Minds of Autism

Needless to say, the dining hall, as well as being busy, crowded and a source of multiple odours, was also very noisy, as trays were picked up and clattered back down, cutlery jangled, and metal serving dishes clanged against metal hot plates. Meanwhile, the children, squeezed into rows of tiny seats bolted on to collapsible dining tables, grew louder and louder to make themselves heard over the racket. Indeed, the lunch queue alone can be the place where sensory problems ‘can turn into a nightmare’ (Sainsbury 2009, p.99). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, all of the child contributors to this book – Grace, James, Rose and Zack – identified noise and crowds as being the most difficult aspects of school from a sensory point of view.

Indeed, the school environment can present autistic children with a multi-sensory onslaught in terms of sounds, smells, textures and visual impacts that constitutes both a distraction and a source of discomfort (Ashburner, Ziviani and Rodger 2008; Caldwell 2008). There was also clear evidence from my own study that sensory issues, and noise in particular, can be highly exclusionary factors for autistic children in schools.

Inclusive Education for Autistic Children: Helping Children and Young People to Learn and Flourish in the Classroom

🚀 It’s Not Rocket Science: Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time.

Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time.

It’s Not Rocket Science: Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic children and young people

Just listen. It’s not rocket science, just listen.

Daisy

Outside space. Many people find being outside and in natural very calming. Space to move away from other people, internal noises and distractions can be a good way to self-regulate. 

“I think things that are useful for autistic people would be beneficial for everyone. It would have stopped a lot of distress for a lot of people if they can take themselves away and calm down.”
Emily 

A sensory room or de-stress room. Easy access to a quiet space to de-stress can be an enormously helpful tool for people to be able to self-manage. Ideally, this room will be away from areas where there is heavy footfall or other outside noise. Many people find neutral spaces beneficial, with the option of lights and other sensory stimulus. 

“I think you should just be able to walk into the sensory room instead of asking staff and waiting for them to unlock it.”
Jamie 

It’s Not Rocket Science: Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic children and young people

🧺 Main Takeaways

• In order to maintain healthy attention kids need three things that are often in short supply in schools — fresh air, large muscle movement, and daylight.
• School should go further than providing space, light, and air: “It should be a place where the child can feel that he belongs, where he can move in freedom, and where he can enjoy immediate contact with the outdoors.”
• Children deserve and flourish in an atmosphere of love, community, mutual respect, beauty and a connectivity to nature.
• A covered porch – allowing learning to stay outdoors in any weather – is essential.
• When people have a storied relationship with a place, when they know its history and understand the flora and fauna that call it home, they care.
• To develop a lasting connection with place, three qualities are required: paying intimate attention, creating a storied relationship rather than a purely sensory awareness, and engaging in reciprocal ethical unity.
• Becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.
• As long as we protect nature, nature will protect us.
• As long as we continue to remove ourselves from nature, nature will not be able to protect us from environmental impacts.
• There is nothing more human than play. Humans were designed to learn in play. In fact, nearly all mammals evolved this way.
• While stimming, we are able to unravel the everyday ordinary barrage of sensory and social information that becomes overwhelming.
• Most of us stim because it calms us and helps alleviate our high levels of anxiety.
• Neurodivergent people have heightened neuroception and different bio-social responses to stimulus.
• Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time.
• Everything is interconnected.

Love Earth
And your love comes back to you
Love Earth
Such an easy thing to do
Love Earth
Till the water and the air is pure
From the birds in the sky
To the fishes deep in the sea

Love Earth
Love Earth
Love Earth

The place where all the children can live
(Love Earth)
Really nothing better to give
(Love Earth)
And your love comes back to you
So I’m calling out
So I’m calling out to you

Love Earth
Love Earth

The sky was blue and the air so clean
The water crystal clear
We lived by the sun and have it all
We were living in a dream

Love Earth
Love Earth
Love Earth

We can bring the seasons back
(Love Earth)
Can you imagine that
(Love Earth)
Your love comes back to you

So I’m calling out
So I’m calling out to you
Love Earth
The sky was blue and the ear so clean
The water crystal clear
We lived by the sun and have it all
We were living in a dream
Love Earth
Love Earth

Love Earth by Neil Young with Crazy Horse