Make this winter a learning experience
For months, families have been helped along in the pandemic with privileges the warmer months afforded us: long walks, family bike rides and even some physically distant socializing in backyards, parks or on patios.
Now we brace for what feels like a long winter ahead, with rising case loads requiring us to limit our contacts and warm fall days sure to give way to chilly temperatures and snowy sidewalks.
Coping with “COVID winter” — as I’ve taken to calling it — is going to require many of us to re-examine our relationship with the outdoors.
If you’ve been the kind of person who hates winter and avoids it as much as possible, doing so this year may come at a higher cost. After all, we’re spending so much time at home these days, many of us without the benefit of casual interactions with colleagues and classmates. We won’t likely be catching up with friends at holiday parties or hockey arenas. If we don’t make a point to get out for mood-boosting walks and snowball fights, it could be pretty rough for mental health and family harmony.
While I don’t relish scraping windshields or shovelling sidewalks, I’m one of those winter sports enthusiasts who does all right in the colder months. I’ve got skis, skates and snowshoes, and expect I’ll be OK.
But for advice on how the winter wary can learn to extend outside time with their families this year, I thought I’d turn to outdoor educators, sometimes referred to as land-based educators, for advice.
These folks are savvy at both staying warm in cold weather — essential for enjoying the outdoors all year round — and for finding ways to engage with the natural world no matter what the date on the calendar.
Christopher Green, director of the Guelph Outdoor School in Guelph, said that while it may sound rudimentary, dressing properly is the first step to extending outdoor activity into the cold season.
“Your first layer, the one that touches your skin, should be wool and it should be thin,” Green said. Having your head covered and a pair of extra socks at the ready is also important.
This kind of clothing can be expensive to purchase new, so look to local buyand-sell or free-cycle groups online, work your contacts for hand-me-downs or check out thrift shops.
Dress in layers, then add or subtract them to be warm but not sweaty — if your clothes get wet, you’ll get cold, he said.
When you head outside with the family, make it an experience that’s led by your kids’ inquiry, not one where you’re explaining the flora and fauna to the best of your ability, said Green. “There are ways of engaging kids and appealing to their curiosity and their brilliance without actually just telling them what everything is.”
For example, birds are everywhere, even on busy city streets, so opportunities to learn more about them are available even if you’re nowhere near a forest. But if your child asks you to name one, consider putting the question back to them even if you know the answer, Green said: “Wow, look at that. Is that is that a black cap that I see on their head? Yeah, I think it is. But what colour is the beak, and why is that beak so stubby? Is it for cracking nuts or burrowing into a tree? What do you think?”
The key thing is discovering what your child can get passionate about in the outdoors. “Are they looking at plants, or are they stoked on birds, or are they just little fire starters who want to tend a fire all day long in the backyard?” Green said. (I had an opportunity to visit Guelph Outdoor School for a column in 2019, where I witnessed a group of very enthusiastic boys learning to make a friction fire — supervised, of course.)
Kids who love technology may want to use an old digital camera or smart phone (airplane mode and no games!) to document the experience with photos and video.
Garrison McCleary, a land-based educator and professor of Indigenous studies at Conestoga College in Kitchener, said land-based spaces have facilitated the relationships we’ve had with each other during the pandemic, and that it’s going to be important to hold on to that through the winter.
“When we’re out on the land we’re already in the process of de-stressing; the land is facilitating that work whether we know it or not.”
In fact, there’s an interesting parallel with winter to consider as we contemplate what it means to take care of ourselves as the pandemic months wear on.
“Having the ability to go out on the land in the wintertime, from an Indigenous perspective, has some significance to understanding what it means to rest, and what it means to look after oneself,” McCleary said. “(That’s) because that whole process of that blanket of snow that covers our first mother … is doing that regenerative work in the wintertime.”
As for how to entertain the family outside this winter, he suggests trying your hand at searching for animal tracks in the snow. “Tracking is a really fun thing to do and winter is the best time to do tracking. That’s why traditionally we did trapping in the winter time.” You only need a backyard, city park or other bit of green space to have fun figuring out what kind of animals are in the area and track their movements.
“There are plenty of apps that you can get on your phone, guides you can download as PDFs and print off and take out with you when you go walking that will give you kind of an outline for how you can identify those different types of tracks.”
Another simple idea — look at snowflakes under a magnifying glass “because each one of those little snowflakes are different.”
The most important thing, he says, is letting kids ask questions and the land provide the answers.
Land-based learning “involves the wholeness of our being,” McCleary said, and kids are experts in driving that wholeness.
“For us as Indigenous people, they’re closest to the spirit world, and same with elders at the other end of that spectrum. So adults, in fact, have a lot to learn by watching and observing how their kids are engaging with the land.”