Imagine a Preschool where children are encouraged to interact with animals and plants, and are equipped with life skills that allow them to to grow their own food. Gabriele Capobianco, Edoardo Capuzzo Dolcetta, Jonathan Lazar, and Davide Troiani, did just that and won the first prize in the AWR International Ideas Competition in early 2016.
The Italian team designed a farming nursery school, “Nursery Fields Forever” that re-imagined what nursery schools could be like. The idea for a Farming Preschool addresses the fact that children, particularly those living in urban environments, lack direct experience which has misled the children’s perception of the world. For example, today’s children often ignore that milk comes from living animals or that beans don’t sprout in cans.
This preschool recognizes that children are inherently and intuitively curious naturalists, which is stimulated and guided to create a unique educational approach, holistically combining nature and food cultivation into its curriculum.
Play, nature and technique are combined with the the school farm to create three ways to learn:
- learning from nature
- learning from technique
- learning from practice
In this nursery school, a child’s development is encouraged through interaction with animals and plants, which also builds self-esteem and social interaction. They also integrate traditional learning environments and more experimental spaces to combine learning and farming. Teachers help teach children how to respect and domesticate animals and plants, seeing the way those things affect their lives. The students would also learn about renewable energy from onsite wind turbines and solar arrays.
Source: AWR Competitions
Similar Stories:
- Federally Funded Grants for US Farmers
- Health and Environmental Hazards of GMOs: An Annotated Bibliography.
- Local Food Is Elitist? Part I
- Five Myths About Food Safety and Home Gardens
- The Principles of Permaculture: A Series of Examples–This Week, Alpacas!
