Before my grandmother passed away last year, I was regularly amazed by her encyclopaedic memory for the wildflowers, trees and creatures she could see from her home in the Scottish Highlands.

This love was initiated and fostered by her primary school teacher in rural Berkshire in the Thirties.

The teacher, whose name is sadly lost to history, would take her class for nature walks, collect and press wildflowers and look up names and information in guides.

She would also regularly quiz her class on what they learned from these activities.

These walks stayed with my grandmother throughout her life, enriching and sustaining her throughout the war, becoming a parent and a grandparent and well into old age and the loss of her husband.

Nature’s healing power

During lockdown, much attention has been paid to the return of wildlife to our towns and cities and many of us have a newfound interest in bird watching or gardening.

Young people, too, have had more time perhaps to explore their gardens or neighbourhoods, or engage in outdoor activities, whether through school-directed learning, parents or their own initiative.

International schools must build on this phenomenon to help students to pay greater attention to the natural world that exists around us - wherever we are. As naturalist Emma Marris says in her Ted Talk: “Every kid lives near nature. We’ve just somehow forgotten how to see it.”

For example, despite living in heavily urbanised areas of Hong Kong, my students and I have discovered all kinds of unusual and fascinating birds, insects, plants and sea life surrounding us.

Much of which would have been ignored or unnoticed if we had not set tasks to observe our surroundings as part of the City Nature Challenge.

In this annual global event, students are challenged to have a “Bioblitz” where they use the iNaturalist app to photograph and identify bugs, birds and any other plants or creatures living in urban areas.

In Hong Kong, students spotted animals such as wild boar, giant African snails and huntsman spiders but also learned about fascinating but overlooked creatures we see every day, such as sparrows, ants and moths.

Mental health benefits

If we wish to foster young people who will be able to understand and deal with the environmental challenges they will face in the future, we owe it to them to foster the same knowledge, understanding and love for nature that my grandmother’s teacher developed in her young mind.

Furthermore, we are all aware of the challenges to mental health that our current crisis is creating for children and adults.

If international schools can encourage their communities to take some time to turn off the laptop, put down the phone and pay attention to nature, they may help to sustain a more positive mental outlook.

As writer Richard Louv, who coined the term “nature-deficit disorder”, has said: “Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child’s life. Unlike television, nature does not steal time. It amplifies it. Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighbourhood.”

Given the benefits that nature can offer our children then, how can schools make this move to incorporate more nature-inspired lessons?

Five resources to get you started

Here are some resources, activities and suggestions that could help your school community open up the surrounding natural world during lockdown and beyond:

1. The iNaturalist and Seek apps are an amazing free tech resource for phones or tablet which allows the user to take photos, identify, share and learn from experts about the everyday plants and animals that surround them.

School leaders should also consider adding the City Nature Challenge to their calendars.

This is a global competition based on using the apps above, next due to take place in the spring of 2021.

2. Once students have identified wildlife and nature, teachers across the curriculum can encourage creative responses to their findings through art projects, writing haiku or nature poetry, or constructing bug hotels or bird boxes.

Some useful resources for this can be found in the resources accompanying the book The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris from the John Muir Trust.

3. The Ted Ed Earth School is a UN-supported scheme of 30 quests featuring online video lessons, quizzes, challenges and resources to build an understanding of the natural world and develop meaningful actions which can be taken at home or in school.

4. The Big Here is a set of questions developed by futurist Kevin Kelly which can work as a potential whole-school or community collaborative challenge to learn about how our homes are all connected though natural and man-made systems, such as the watershed, weather systems and presence of indigenous or invasive plants.

5. Schools could use or adapt the National Trust’s 50 Things to Do before you’re 11 3/4 as a set of activities or challenges for students to encourage them out of the house. Photos and experiences can be shared on platforms such as Padlet.

David Robinson is an English and humanities teacher at Nord Anglia International School Hong Kong. He has taught internationally for 14 years