Nature education isn’t an independent subject in Finland. We usually talk about environment education that includes environment and sustainable way of living. Environment education and sustainable way of living is a guideline in all education curricula. It is embedded into every school subject and in the early education and care curriculum. The goal is to educate children to live a sustainable life. 

Kindergartens in Finland emphasize spending time in nature and outdoors. Children go outdoors two times every day and do forest trips weekly. Nature has a big role in the ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) curriculum and children learn about nature and spend time there. In Finland, it is recognized that nature is the best place for children to play. In kindergartens, we don’t do any kind of evaluation based on skills or knowledge, nature educational activities or outdoor learning is not something that is evaluated. Nature is seen as a learning platform where children can learn. 

Aesthetic is important in nature education. It is seen in different activities such as in nature art and sense methods (you will learn more about those during this course). Also, observing in nature, seeing, listening and feeling the beauty of nature, is one way to notice nature’s aesthetic elements. You could say that aesthetic is everywhere in nature education, but it is embedded into the way of thinking. Nature is beautiful, it provides us different aesthetic experiences that can lead to positive nature experiences.  

Sports/ physical education is considered in nature education, but it’s not one of the main goals. Exercise is more like a positive side effect. When children do activities in nature, they are simply moving more. Their balance, coordination and motor skills are getting better, because natural environments are more versatile than man-made environments. Children use their bodies in more versatile ways. There have been at least one study about ‘sports and nature pedagogy’ in kindergartens (translated freely, in Finnish it is called ‘Lilu pedagogy’: sports/exercise is in Finnish ‘liikunta’ and nature is ‘luonto’, so the word comes from the first two letters of the words). This pedagogy is starting to be recognized, but it is a new method, so it doesn’t have its own terms or a clear methodology, yet. But the main idea is to combine sports education and nature education. It emphasizes the use of sports to support children’s development and the use of natural environments as learning environments. Also, outdoor learning and adventure pedagogy focus on sports/exercise. Both methods are kind of different from nature and environmental education. They have many same goals, but also their own goals. But in those methods, we don’t have specific terms or methods for sports/physical education.  

Many after school clubs are held by other parties, besides school. For example, local municipality, local community college, some sport clubs, the church etc. Cooperation between the school and the community makes school part of the community. Opinions from parents and children are taken into consideration when teachers plan the after school clubs or optional course in school. An example from the school I used to work for. Our school was very small, only four teachers and 75 kids from 7-12 years old. When we planned the optional courses for the next school year, we first obtained ideas from children and parents. Then, teachers would consider which wishes from parents and children that they could fulfil or have to capacity to execute. For example, there were ideas about acting/theater and filming/how to make videos. We put those ideas together and offered a course called “How to make a short film”. So by this process, the ideas really came from the kids and parents, but teachers create and offer the courses. 

The social emotional skills are taught inside other subjects. There isn’t own course by it self (of course in some schools there might be an optional course offered). In Finnish schools, we have subject for religion/ethics. In in subject, there is plenty of space to teach social emotional skills. We also have some national programs and materials to help teachers, for example, a lesson per week for working with social emotional skills. For example, “Kiva-koulu” which is specially for social skills to prevent bullying https://www.kivaprogram.net. Also, the Finnish National Agency for education offers teachers free materials and there are several books with ready-made lesson plans to help teachers to teach social emotional skills. The importance of the social emotional skills has been realized more and more during past decade and there are different ways to do that in different schools and cities and it is much about the teacher, how much effort he/she puts in it. For example, in Kuopio, the city has hired two drama pedagogues. One of them works with 4th graders (10year old) and the other with 8th graders (14year old). All the kids in these age groups get 2-3 drama workshops about social emotional skills and their teachers get material to work further with these themes during the school year. That is one example on how this can be organized. 

We have some nature educator programs that Finnish educators can take part in to gain their skills. For the past 10 years, we have progressed a lot in this filed and the amount of literatures, courses and programs has increased. My wife and I wrote a book about Outdoor learning in 2014 as we didn’t able to find any materials related to this in Finnish. Now, the situation is totally different and there are lots of books from different professionals available in Finnish language.