For example, you may tell a story of little gnomes baking bread for Mother Earth because she asked for it. The children can then help their little friends help the earth. They feel good at the opportunity to make a contribution to Mother Earth. If you burden children with that kind of information at too early an age, it won't live with them. For older children, composting offers myriad opportunities for scientific exploration.
Older kids can participate in a much more physical way.
Biodynamic composting involves carefully layering straw and alfalfa, manure, other plant material and food scraps in a tall pile, adding water and concentrated herbal preparations at each layer to increase the nutrients, microbial action and vitality of the soil. The effort took all day, and children worked in shifts. While some students piled layers, others stirred the buckets of water with the herbal preparations and others wetted down the straw and plant material. They sold the resulting compost as a class fund-raiser. Prusinskas says that when the piles are complete, they inevitably look like huge loaves of bread, an apt metaphor for the earth-nourishing properties of compost.