Playing in the Dirt

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

Note: For now, 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

When I was a kid, I loved to play in the dirt. I still do Although, now I say I’m exploring the soil, preparing my garden, planting seedlings, building soil, or burying compost. It still gives me the same joy to play in the dirt and now I get fresh, healthy, free-ish food and get to help improve the health of the planet as added benefits! How’s that for an adventure for all of us? This adventure should be great fun for kids of all ages, provide lots of opportunities for learning at all levels, and some valuable techniques for any gardener.

Materials

To do these activities you’ll need a digging tool (a trowel or metal spoon you’re not overly fond of), some newspaper, toothpicks, or chopsticks (you can get by without them), and a quart-sized clear container with a lid. A hand magnifying lens would also come in handy as might a few drops of dish soap.

Educational Tip

Learning happens naturally as we try and make sense of our world.

As you play in the dirt with your child(ren), please remember that learning happens naturally. We animals are very curious about the things around us. Making sense of the world around us is central to our survival. As we move from infancy to adulthood our curiosity-driven sense-making generally expands. Infants spend a lot of time making sense of their direct sensory-motor experiences. Toddlers begin to be able to name and describe their experiences as their own. Older children can abstract general patterns and relationships and use those patterns and relationships to explain new observations and make predictions. It is often useful to have this same sequence in mind as we nurture our children’s learning.  Start with direct sensory-motor experiences, move on to naming and describing, and then abstracting general patterns and relationships and using those patterns and relationships to explain new observations and make predictions. 

For example, a great way to begin to learn about the wonderfully mutual and complex relationships between soil and plants is to begin by playing around with soil. In the following activities, you’ll begin with just such a direct sensory-motor experience of soil, followed by opportunities to describe what you sensed while playing with soil followed by discussing how what you sensed and described impacts soil and plant’s complex relationship. Also, remember that different children will likely have different interests (along with different histories, identities, and other individual differences). Get curious about their interests! Observing what lights your children up will help you guide them along their unique learning path.

Activity

Collecting a soil sample

So… collect up the “tools” listed above and go outside! Your first task is to pick a spot in your yard that seems pretty typical soil-wise. If we were sampling soil for accurate soil testing we would take samples from multiple locations at specific depths. For our purposes, a single sample will do fine.First, scrape off any surface organic matter from directly around your sample location and collect about one cup of soil for your sample.  Exploring soil with our sensesNow spoon some of the soil onto your sheet of newspaper and get to know it: rub it between your fingers, look closely at it, smell it, describe its feel, smell, color, and texture (some folks even taste their soil samples for salt, etc. but we’re not recommending that here).

Sorting soil

Now, see if you can sort out what you see in the soil. If you have a hand lens, this would be a good opportunity to use it or any magnification capabilities available on your phone. As the adult, help the child(ren) only as much as they need, to do the sorting. As you sort, ask them to name and describe what they are seeing and feeling (sticks, small pebbles, sand-sized grains, what else?). If your child(ren) include different things in the same pile (pieces of leaves and pieces of sticks) or make two piles out of similar things, ask them if it also makes sense to separate or combine any of the piles based on similarities or differences.

Making a mud milkshake

Next, fill your clear quart container, still holding the cup of soil, with water, put the lid on, and shake it up! This is where you can also add a few drops of soap to help the soil particles separate. Now set it down and watch what happens over a few minutes. Ask your child(ren) to describe what they see. Then ask questions to prompt them the make sense of what they’re seeing: What seems to be happening? Why do you think you’re seeing what you’re seeing? Why do you think the water is cloudy? Why are some things floating and others sinking? At first, you should be able to note that the organic matter (the part of soil that is not weathered rock and came from living beings) will float (at least at first) to the surface and the water or stay suspended in the water, which will also be cloudy with the tiniest soil particles suspended in it. It may take up to a full day or more for all of the soil particles to settle! Once they do, you should be able to see different layers of soil. The biggest particles, pebbles and sand, will settle to the bottom first, followed by smaller particles called silt with a layer of the smallest particles, called clay settling last as the top layer. Ask your child(ren) to give you a summary of what they saw that soil is made of: What are some of the different kinds of stuff in the soil?; How do you think they got there? Now that you and your children have had a chance to use your senses and motor skills to interact with soil and to informally describe it, let’s talk about the physical structure of soil in more technical terms. I like to start this conversation by building on what kids directly experienced in their observations. The following is for you and older children to read if they want to. This will give you some background context so you can dig deeper into the nature of soil with your child(ren).

Nature Science

Soil is generally composed of five different kinds of materials.

In general, soil is a mixture composed of air (20-30% by volume), water (20-30%), weathered rock (45%), organic matter (5%), and a small but very important volume of macro and microorganisms. Most people forget to name water and air but some probing can help them remember. And most people don’t know how important those organisms are. If you found clumps of soil particles in your sample stuck together, they were held together by microorganisms and exudate (i.e., secretions) from microorganisms!

As you may have seen in the settling of your soil sample the part of soil that is mineral in nature (i.e., weathered rock) comes in three basic sizes which are, from biggest to smallest: sand, silt, and clay. Sand particles are visible and feel grainy. Sand’s main function in soil (from a gardener’s perspective) is that it provides ample spaces for air and roots to spread, and for water to drain through. Second, silt particles are invisible to the naked eye, but can easily be identified under a hand lens and feel like flour. Silt provides more surface area for chemical activity and holds water longer than sand does. Lastly, clay particles feel slippery and are so small that an electron microscope is required to see them. Clay is formed of different minerals than sand and silt and provides the maximum surface area for chemical activity.

The ideal distribution of rock particle size for the gardener is about 40/40/20. However, plants grow in different types of soil based on their endemic and native biomes. Which plants do you notice in uncultivated spaces near your soil sample? What do their roots look like? Do you think they like dry or wet soil? Like our homes, the soil says a lot about who lives there.

The combination of diverse things is very powerful.

The five general components of soil each have their own properties. It is the combination of diverse materials that enables soil to be such a critical contributor to ecosystems. All mixtures include a combination of ingredients. Mixtures behave differently based on the materials and the proportion of each material in the mix. If you’re guiding a group of children, your group is also a mixture. Each of you is unique and your differences make you stronger together than you are apart.

Wrap Up

In this adventure, we’ve explored the physical characteristics of soil and experienced and talked about soil as a mixture of diverse materials. And, we’ve barely scratched the surface of this major contributor to all ecosystems (even aquatic ones). In other adventures, we’ll explore mutualistic relationships in soil and how we humans can contribute to ecosystems through eco-agriculture, perma-culture, and restoration ecology.