How to Make a Sit Spot Practice

A sit spot practice is a simple way to enhance our observational skills, learn about our surroundings, make discoveries, come up with questions, and connect ourselves and our daily lives with the natural world around us.

Other creatures are living their lives all around us all the time, and the changing light and weather patterns are constantly sending us helpful information. As we become more aware of nature, especially our immediate surroundings, we become more connected to the other beings we share the world with, and also this dynamic inanimate world that we share with them. Though it may seem obvious, these animals, insects and plants are individuals with their own temperaments, territories, families and routines. To some extent, we can become participants in their stories, which are perennially unfolding on the landscape. And we can recognize them as influencers in our stories as well.

The way to start a sit spot practice is simply by spending time outdoors sitting in quiet awareness, usually in a particular place in nature that we visit over and over again. By visiting the same place in nature many times, a relationship is developed; you get to know the place in all kinds of weather, many times of day, throughout the seasons, and from a variety of your own states of mind. At Fiddleheads in-person school we practice a communal sit spot every morning at snack time in our regular snack spot. It is a quick daily practice with young children and their short attention spans, but over time it adds much depth and richness to all our other studies. This practice, perhaps more than any other individual activity, effectively builds an emotional bond between our students and the natural world.

Now as we continue at Fiddleheads this fall with online only learning, I am happy to find that sit spots are a practice that easily translates to at home learning. A sit spot practice can be a great practice for families to take up at any time, but the benefits of perspective that a regular practice brings seem especially poignant these days. A sit spot can become like an anchor in your life - a place to settle down, cultivate present-moment awareness and a quieter mind, and to observe the flow of reality occurring around you. It is powerful to watch the cycle of the seasons unfold from a place of continuity. It is engrossing and enlightening to get to know your non-human neighbors. There are complex layers of life and activity around all of us, even in urban neighborhoods. From my yard in SE Portland I have become familiar with the daily and seasonal lives of a pair of Anna’s hummingbirds, a family of raccoons, several squirrel dreys, a pair of great horned owls, a population of crows, a pair of red tailed hawks, a solitary cooper’s hawk, and a great numbers of other birds that pass over and through each season. I watch the blooming schedule of the spring flowers and observe the plethora of pollen and seed events unfolding. I follow the winds and witness the weather. I could go on and on. There is a lot that we can learn by spending a few minutes a day sitting quietly in observation even just in our own back yards or on our porches and stoops.

To begin a sit spot practice with young children, we want to present some simple guidelines. Role modeling has an incredible impact. It is best to plan to do this practice with your child. A sit spot practice with young children only takes about 5 minutes a day, so it shouldn’t be a big burden to incorporate in, especially with a little planning.

1. Choose an easy, accessible outdoor place to observe nature near your home. A back yard, back step, porch or deck is great. Pick someplace that you can get to easily, that you can sit in relatively comfortably in all weather, and where you will have few distractions. It is nice to choose this place together with your child.
   
   2. Choose a time of day that you can regularly commit to doing this practice. Maybe right before breakfast, or during morning snack. Anything that you can make work is perfect, so just make it as easy for yourself as possible. You want to make it easy to remember to practice, and easy to get into practice, so picking a moment that you can easily transition into it is key. Once it becomes routine, it’ll be easy as pie.
   
   3. Once you are ready to begin your practice, go to your spot and get comfortable. Check in with your senses together and take a moment to talk about tuning in to the ways that we notice things: our eyes, our ears, our nose, our sense of touch. (We don’t talk about taste usually at this time with the kids, since we don’t routinely taste the natural world to observe it.) Then take 20-30 seconds of silence and practice “noticing” everything that you can. Noticing is a really good word that we use a lot at forest school, so introduce this vocabulary if it is new. We talk  about noticing as meaning to "use our senses to find out about things." Our ability to notice is like a cool superpower that can help us out in so many ways.
   
   4. After the observation time is up, take a few minutes to share with each other what you have noticed. Check all the senses we described and see if you can come up with something for each sense that you noticed during your sit spot time. Make sure to listen to your child’s observations and affirm them, even if they sound a little kooky. The line between imaginary and real is very fine at this age, and it’s ok to get confused between noticing and imagining. Feel free to ask questions to clarify though, and see if they can hone in on their actual experience. What questions and suppositions does their real experience lead to? What questions and suppositions does yours lead to? For example, do you see the same 3 squirrels every day? Or are they different? Can you tell? What relationship to each other might they have? Where might their drey be? Use these questions and “I wonders” as a tool to fuel further nature research and discovery if you are so inclined.
   
   It is great here to take a moment to talk about things that you noticed in the past too, and how today is different from the day or the week or the month before that. Once you have been doing the practice for a while, bridging the past like this can be really eye opening and amazing to young children. It can help them orient themselves to the passage of time and the cycles of the year, which are whole new concepts in preschool and kindergarten that they are just beginning to wrap their minds around.
   
   5. At this point, it can be beneficial to take your observations and make quick note of them in a journal. On each page you can write the date for the day, and talk about the significance of that with your child. Even just reading the date off to them is a great introductory activity. Have them dictate to you the things that they noticed and think should be recorded. Then if they are so inclined, they can do some drawing or “writing” on the page themselves.
   
   For children ages 4 and 5, this journaling is a recommended activity, and for children aged 3 it is really optional, depending on your child’s interest. For all of them though, this activity is really about the observational skills, not about the writing skills. Kindergarten and first grade are great times to work on reading and writing skills, and there will be plenty of time for that. During the preschool years we are working on bigger, broader things and it is really important to make space for children’s natural inclinations during this time. If they want to write a book every day about their sit spot, great! If writing about it is a chore or is turning them off, don’t worry about it. Better to keep it at the level that they are engaged at. There is so much to be gained just from the practice of being still and noticing. It is a great, life long skill that we can appropriately begin working on right now, and can continue growing in for the rest of our lives.
   
   

Sharing! We also like to take the opportunity to share the things that we find in our sit spots and see and hear about what others are noticing in their practices. The facebook online learning group is a great place to do this. It’s so fun and inspiring to share these discoveries!

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