CHILDREN AND NATURE IN THE CITY

摘要

How do children relate and interact with their natural and built environments? What opportunities are we, schools, and other groups, providing children with to help their encounters to be a positive and healthy - even enjoyable - experience?1 My recent move from my very first school of St John's, Stanmore, in Harrow, to Woolmore School, Tower Hamlets, has rekindled these fundamental questions and how we might approach these issues.rnMy first school is favoured by a grassy football pitch edged by native trees and a wild corner, within walking distance of The Corporation of London's Bentley Priory National Nature Reserve, including a deer park, ponds and woodland, and is a very short bus ride away from the Thames Valley Education Centre at Clay Lane. Though part of north London, it is very green suburban. The Tower Hamlets school, by contrast, is set in the very urban Poplar district, the school sited across the road from several high-rise estates. The city', with Canary Wharf's gleaming towers, marks out the skyline.