Fairy Houses, Forts, Dens, Natural Building, and Ecological Design

Explorations in Ecology for Children and Their Adults: Transformative Adventures for All of Us

Note: This blog is a serialization of a book titled Explorations in Ecology for Children and Their Adults: Transformative Adventures for All of Us. Here is the preface. The first adventure is Taking Education Outside.

Introduction

Kids love building structures! Until recently, kids used natural or hand-crafted materials to build. Then came manufactured wooden blocks and tin toys, followed by snap-together pieces of plastic like the ubiquitous Lego bricks. These days, many kids do their building with Minecraft or some other virtual sandbox environment. While manufactured and virtual blocks may have their place, building with natural materials has many affordances that manufactured and virtual materials do not. Making things with natural materials is a great way to connect with nature and provides many opportunities to learn science. Beyond that, building with natural materials fosters ecological thinking and design through play! It’s also an activity that children from toddlers to elders (yes, us elders can be children, too) can joyfully engage in at their level with appropriate scaffolding (i.e., help from you).

Activity

Building Fairy Houses

Younger children love constructing fairy houses. Building homes for their little friends seems to inspire their imaginations. Your role is to offer this activity as a possibility and to collect natural materials, such as small sticks and rocks, along with the children if they need or want your help. Then sit on the ground with them and play with them or do your own building alongside them.

I like to use my building to introduce new possibilities. Try arranging rocks and sticks in various patterns (geometric shapes like circles and spirals are fun) or stack them to build walls and more complicated structures. In your own play, you can stack sticks, log-cabin style or stick them in the ground to form walls. You can push two forked (i.e., branched) sticks into the ground and put a stick across them as the support for a lean-to. You can also weave twigs or grass between the stick poles you stick in the ground. 

You can interject suggestions and questions without breaking their play-flow. Do you notice how every rock (stick, piece of bark, etc.) is unique? How does that rock feel? Is it rough or smooth? Does it have a smell? What about that rock made it special to you?

Your littles can also join in any of the activities described below for older kids with scaffolding as long as their “jobs” are selected to be within their learning zone (i.e., things they can do with help). Building fairy houses is also a great jumping-off point for upper-elementary-aged kids.

Building Forts

Older kids enjoy building larger structures to use as forts that fit multiple kids. If kids don’t come up with the techniques mentioned above (e.g., stacking sticks log cabin style), you can introduce them in your own constructions. When kids are building forts, I encourage them to look for locations that have lots of usable resources and include features that can be incorporated into whatever they are building. 

Forts can become shelters. If the kids seem interested, I’ll sometimes suggest they try and make their fort wind and/or rain-resistant. I often talk with older kids about how the features of the materials they select (the structure of those materials) make them a good match for how they intend to use them (the function of the material). For example, dry grass makes good insulation for floors, walls, and roofs because grasses are basically hollow tubes, and branches can be used for weaving in and out between other branches (their function) because they are flexible (a structural feature). 

I often use shelter-building time to discuss common forest patterns like fibers, tubes, sheets, bundles, layers, branching, symmetry, and spirals. Patterns that Connect has more information on patterns in ecosystems.

Kids may want to immediately cut branches, twigs, and leaves off of branches they want to use because, hey, cutting is fun! When this happens I encourage them to make sure those branch appendages that make each branch different from the next are not useful in some way before they cut them off. I talk about this as an example of using diversity as a resource just as it is in ecosystems. 

I encourage kids to use materials that are already dead. But, when we harvest live materials we pay attention to how this action impacts the community we share with this plant. Nicolette says this poem often when foraging or looking for materials with students: “Leave the first berry/flower you see for the next being in need. Leave the biggest flower/seed you see for the world to see.” It is now whispered to themselves and they remind others. For branches, Nicolette reminds their students, “Dead branches break, while live branches bend.” Encouraging them to notice the differences in branches around them, and which may be suitable for their specific needs.

If you're feeling adventurous you can introduce string (I use jute string because it is a natural material that decomposes easily) and teach them to tie knots and use lashing to hold sticks together to make tents and floors and roofs or to tie bundles of grass together (bundles are a common pattern in nature). If you’re feeling super adventurous, look up reverse twist cordage, and show your kids how to make string from natural materials.

You might also consider plastering parts of forts with Cob, a natural building material made from mud. See Mud, Mixtures, and Miskers for more information on working with Cob.

Building with Tarps

Although not a natural material, tarps are useful as waterproof coverings over a fire or fort. They can be used to cover any shelter or on their own to provide a place out of the rain. If I’m using a tarp on its own as a roof, I try to use trees as the only supports. If I can, I tie the four corners, each to their own tree. Alternatively, I tie a ridge line between two trees and drape a tarp over the ridgeline. To avoid tearing,, we recommend bypassing the grommets on your tarp and instead bunching up each corner around a smooth stone and tying off around that stone, illustrated below. We also recommend that you learn how to tie a trucker's hitch. This knot is very useful for lines that you might need to tighten.

Building Debris Shelters

Debris shelters are easy and fun to build, can be used in survival situations, and provide a great context for talking about the science of heat. Debris shelters are generally for a single occupant. They are used in short-term survival situations when it's cold and a fire is not possible or practical. They function as organic sleeping bags. They’re fun to build but are not useful as hangout spaces. 

The basic idea of a debris structure is to build a simple frame slightly larger than you and pile a thick layer of debris from the forest floor as your floor, walls, and roof. One of the easiest ways to build a debris shelter is to lean a sturdy pole about three feet longer than the shelter’s single occupant against a stump or suitable rock about three feet high. Then treat that pole as the spine of the frame and lean smaller sticks as ribs against the spine from the front to the back on both sides about six inches apart. Next, cover your frame with small branches. If there are leaves still attached to the branches all the better. Finally, stuff leaves in the shelter to form the floor that will insulate its occupant from the cold floor and cover the whole thing with as much debris as you can gather to form up to a three-foot thick covering over the whole structure.

Engaging in Ecological Design

Mostly when I build fairy houses, forts, or shelters with kids I do very little upfront talking and limit my interference with their play to expressing safety concerns and answering questions they ask. Occasionally, I’ll introduce the idea of a design process by talking with them about their goals for their structures. If they’re building a fairy house or a fort, I’ll start by asking them questions like: how many beings would you like to be able to fit in your structure? How big are the beings that will live there? Do they need accommodations, such as low to the ground or a grippy floor? I also talk with them about what resources they will use (e.g., sticks, stones, leaves). If they’re building a fort, I’ll ask similar questions about how they plan to use it. After talking about these questions, I’ll summarize the design process as thinking about (1) Goals to be achieved, (2) Resources to be used, and (3) an Action Plan for completing the project. When I talk with kids about the design process, I also often bring up the idea of ecological thinking and design. The following science section of this post includes more information about these important practices.

Nature Science

Analytic reductionism is the practice of breaking things into pieces and looking at each piece in isolation. This way of looking at the world is simultaneously one of the triumphs and greatest mistakes in the history of science. Factories are both a product of reductionist-analytic thinking and a contributor to the development of mechanistic systems thinking and the misapplication of mechanistic ideas to living systems. Since their eruption onto the scene, factories have heavily influenced how people think about the world, both by reinforcing the view of systems as assemblies of parts into larger and larger machines and by contributing new ideas like interchangeable parts and conformance to standards.

The kinds of patterns that typify forests and factories are very different. Factories are designed to produce standardized products using static, linear, unidirectional, and hierarchical patterns of interactions between parts. Forests and other ecosystems are constantly changing as they self-organize through complex webs of interdependent relationships among diverse contributors to the system that often include circular pathways through which nutrients flow. Ecological thinking involves a focus on interdependence and the inter-relatedness of ecosystem contributors including living beings and abiotic features of ecosystems. It also includes consideration of how diverse contributors work together to form complex systems.

Ecological design includes minimizing harm done to ecosystems, and thinking about designed systems and their surrounding ecosystems in terms of relationships both within and between those systems. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define ecological design as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes. This can include: 

• using natural materials harvested in ways that benefit or at least do minimum harm to the ecosystem,

• considering the features of the place where you are building including hazards (e.g., water flow, proximity to animal trails, presence of standing dead-trees, change of seasons) and resources including building materials, and

• integrating the design with its surrounding ecosystem by forming new mutually beneficial relationships with other ecosystem features (e.g., forts may become places for birds to perch and for lizards to hunt insects).

Education Ideas

Coercion, forcing children to do things they don’t want to do, plays a major role in the kind of educational environments some of us call factory schools. In such schools, power flows down through governmental agencies, to school leaders, to teachers, to students. This kind of environment prepares children to follow orders and be passive consumers and producers in our consumerist culture. It also takes time away from free play, an important part of childrens’ learning and development. 

The sessions I coordinate for homeschooling families and afterschool programs are free of coercion and feature play in many forms. They also feature shared decision-making and lots of room for individual choices. I make it very clear that the only thing children have to do while they’re with me is be at our pick-up spot when their grownups arrive and be kind to themselves, each other, and the Earth. How do I balance lack of coercion with wanting kids to have particular experiences? At the start of every session, I share my ideas for what we might do and ask the kids what they want to do. My suggestions are based on their interests, what’s happening in our local ecosystem, and my interest in them learning nature skills and making sense of how ecosystems work.

I sometimes refer to this approach as guiding from behind. Nicolette calls it, mirroring their present. I figuratively and often physically follow them and sometimes guide their activity based on what I see ahead of us. Much of the “teaching” I do comes in snippets in response to their questions or based on something I see them doing or something I see in the environment. For example, I might remind a child not to carve towards themselves or point out three species of bees peacefully harvesting pollen and nectar from the same inflorescence on a rubber rabbitbrush plant.

Play and playful activity and relationships also characterize our approach. Many educators talk about the importance of play in general for learning and development. For those of us who believe in the importance of deep nature connection, playing outside with natural materials has special importance. Through such play, children gain an intuitive foundation for ecological thinking and ecological design. The variability inherent in natural materials and their properties is one of those affordances provided by natural materials we mentioned in the introduction. When children build with manufactured blocks or other building pieces they learn how to assemble uniform parts designed to fit together. When children build with natural materials they learn to work with nature! Natural building, including building fairy houses, motivates looking at a landscape to see what locations have useful resources including features that can be integrated into what we’re building. Natural building also involves looking at diverse materials very carefully and seeing how those materials fit together. 

Wrap Up

Building fairy houses, forts, and shelters is deeply enjoyable. It is also a way to learn about natural building, ecological thinking, and ecological design while playing. Interacting with natural materials and building in natural landscapes is a great way to get a feel for working with non-human nature. We encourage you to use these activities here as a jumping-off place. Indigenous architecture and survival shelters are prime starting points! Discussing and questioning what communities thought was important in their housing: do they need a portable house? Does it snow? Do they live separately or together? Do they travel by sea? How small or big should the frame be? There are also cob houses and Earthships as modern examples that could foster further ideas about reusing items, recycling, and long-term shelters being ecologically sound.