New York Teacher Combats Nature-Deficit Disorder in Students

Utica Observer-Dispatch – December 30, 2007

On a typical day it’s not unusual to see Charles Watkins’ sixth-grade class at Mount Markham Middle School taking a nature walk to start their school day.

Since last year, Watkins has been encouraging exercise and connections with nature with his students. He’s also using researched-based strategies such as Brain Gym, a program that supports the idea that exercise improves academic performance.
“What I’m trying to do is change the way their school goes,” said Watkins. “I think schools have to fit the kids, not having kids fit the schools.”

Exercise
During the course of the school day, Watkins and his students go on power walks and perform exercises such as push ups and jumping jacks.

“Physical movement has an effect on brain activity,” he said. “It releases endorphins and gives you a better ability to deal with stress.”

He also interweaves Brain Gym activities throughout the students’ school day.
The educational program promotes and activates use of both sides of a child’s brain, which is believed to improve focusing and learning skills.

The exercises include activities with kid-friendly names such as the double doodle and the lazy eights, which employ arm movement.

“I like when we do the cross crawl,” said Nicki Wakefield, 11.
The cross crawl activity involves the students touching their left knee with their right hand.

“It gets you to use both sides of your brain,” said Paul Gates, also 11.
Watkins has been a teacher for more than 20 years and in those years he saw a need to encourage creative thinking.

“What has happened in the last couple of years is, I saw students predominantly using the right brain in their pattern of thinking,” he said.

Nature and education
In addition to exercise, Watkins encourages his students to connect with nature, through walks and various environmental-themed field trips.

His ideas are based on a book called “The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder.”

“Like it or not, we are all organic creatures,” he said. “The world that we’re born into is a functioning natural world. When we get divorced from it, in the end we tend to suffer from it.”

Watkins even takes them camping twice a year.
During a portion of the camping trip, Watkins and the class took walks just to listen to the surrounding sounds.

Connections with nature promotes creativity, use of senses, improved attention span as well as other positive effects, he said.
“What we’re really trying to do is teach them to work better with what they have,” he said. “When anybody can learn to control hearing, to make a conscious effort to listen, it tends to improve anything they’re engaged in.”

Students benefit
Watkins serves students that include academically at-risk students. That includes students like Charles Coope, 12 of West Winfield, who has dyslexia.
Anne Coope, his mother, says that ever since he’s been taking Watkins’ class, his reading and his general attitude toward life and school changed.

“His grades this year have been phenomenal,” she said. “I think Mr. Watkins is teaching them that they can, and they are able to do it.”

The confidence her son has gained from the teaching strategies shows, she said.
“He’s showing them, that it may take longer, but they can do it,” she said.
In addition to her son’s poor grades, one of the major problems was just getting him to go to school.

“I would have to fight with my son to go to school,” she said. “Now, he’s up on his own, totally different.”

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