I have always felt extremely grateful for my childhood, growing up close to nature and experiencing many things that much of our society does not.
My own childhood spent deeply immersed in nature clearly showed me that many people don’t understand the incredible benefits of nature experience, or how to integrate it into the prepared environment.
I knew I had tools that others did not: a childhood immersed in the wilderness of Canada, gardening, milking the cow in the morning, digging for worms and exploring everywhere in the forests, rivers and lakes that surrounded us.
Plus, I had skills, as a Montessori educator, to prepare an environment for the child. Indeed, I have spent many years experimenting with various forms of nature integration, particularly for children who did not have spontaneous access to it.
I can still hear my trainer’s voice, Judi Orion, telling us that our outdoor environment should be as prepared an our indoor.
None of my experiments integrated so satisfyingly with the natural work period of the Montessori environment as the simple life cycle of microgreens and composting worms, the foundations of the NatureTot System that you see today.
The truth is that it is really difficult to give independent and spontaneous access to the young child if you do not have a structure, a prepared environment–one for the educator as much as for the child.
With the support of Yukon University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and using my experience, I tested and developed these tools that would make it more accessible to many. The first priority in design was the child.
However, I understood not everyone could or would want to purchase something of such expense or size. Yet, I believed that nature should be accessible to all children.
Hence, I have spent the last year developing a more feasible option for educators with limited budgets or spaces.
Educators can now purchase the course as a standalone product. With the course, they receive guidance through video, text and community, plus they get access to a multitude of curated materials and of the individual cabinets!
This will allow them to customize their own space to their needs. For educators who have limited space or budget, soon we will be launching a variable-sized cabinet, which allows for repetition while supporting child and microgreen.
Whether you supply everything yourself, or supplement with some or all of our products, our online training simplifies the complexity of bringing a simple life cycle into the prepared environment. Each lesson is carefully crafted to prepare the environment for the next lesson, embedding purpose and interest for each activity.
And importantly, our course provides stringent safety and maintenance protocols, task checklists for your team, and an implementation plan. These tools will help you develop your prepared nature environment, providing the child with spontaneous and engaging work in a nature-based community, and giving you confidence and skill to implement this.
Join us today! Let’s create a new kind of environment for the child of tomorrow!