One thing that I really love about kids is how they go about building friendships. There is an honesty about the whole ritual of circling someone new, finding a little thread that is common ground( ie a bat or ball, or game) and then allowing things to grow from there.  And it is this simplicity that attracted me to the Green Lane Diary and its approach to building environmental awareness in students.

How do you get kids or even adults for that matter to love something that they dont even know….the key is developing  habits. And a diary is the most typical form of habit that we all know…like the calendar, like the sunrise, it is going to happen and come around again tomorrow. So why not tap into this routine and build relations around routine. Kids respond to routine, it gives them a place in the ocean of life, a bearing to align themselves with. But with routine comes practice and out of practice comes habit and this starts a pattern of growth, like the rings on a tree there for all to see.. And at the end of the day, culture is really just habit…otherwise quite simply known as the way we do things around here.

So when I saw the Green Lane Diary Project it struck me from the outset that this is the best way for kids to get to know the world around them by creating a routine and building the growth rings of the friendship with the metronome of time beating away in the form of a diary. Students latch on to the familiarity, the predictability, the comfort of knowing that they are making friends and seeing these new friends( the tasks, the development, the learning) each day/week. Recording, taking notes, making observations are all tasks but they are more than that, they become like stay overs, or after school play dates, or training, …a routine builder that is just their day to day.

The link here  is to the Green Lane Diary  project and their current call out for support with their campaign. And the Green Lane Diary is one of many initiatives of the Green Cross  who you can learn more about here : Green Cross.

Growth patterns start from the seed and the seedling.