Nature-Based Learning has measurable socio-emotional, academic, and wellbeing benefits
Weekday screen time of over two hours each day increases mental health risks in adolescents with additional anxiety linked to passive scrolling on screens.
The complete Virginia Cooperative Extension handbook for building and maintaining a school garden along with many other resources.
Written with educators in mind, this manual covers everything you need to know to get a “wild garden” started, including how to plan your native garden, species lists for various growing conditions, and more.
Are they back yet?? We are keeping our finger’s crossed but meanwhile there’s lots to see and notice. Many classrooms tune-in to the live feed as background during student work time – nothing like nature to help students focus.
This school uses a community approach to creating beautiful learning spacesfor the school. They’ve generously shared their ‘how to’ and it’s truly inspirational!
A thinking routine adaptation of See, Think, Wonder that encourages observation, inference, and most importantly that new information can change our understanding.
This WS supports a culminating activity after the scavenger walk.
This WS supports the scavenger walk.
An outdoor adventure provides vocabulary scaffolding that becomes a foundation for expressive writing. The slides introduce the worksheets.
This thinking routine from Harvard’s Project Zero teaches observation, interpretation, and inquiry.
Let students create their own, or provide ‘prompts’ as a morning message challenge.
A new take on equations gives students exploration in divergent thinking, part/whole exploration, and encapsulation.
After the group slides lesson, students can create their own analogies. Scan them into slides for a digital ‘gallery walk.’
Analogies facilitate problem solving, knowledge across subjects, and innovative thinking.
A simple question can inspire deep thinking and writing.
A simple question can inspire deep thinking and drawing.
Start with a simple question to inspire connection, vocabulary, original thinking, and a beautiful writing product.
Get started helping your child be observant and present to the world in the easiest of daily routines.
This free download will be an instant family heirloom!
Explore biodiversity and the delicate balance of living organisms through questioning, investigating, creating a model, and evaluating data. Bring it all to life by assisting that biodiversity through the creation of clay seed bombs.
Using nature as a backdrop, students explore patterns and how those patterns are evident everywhere around us. Students will use motif, color, balance, symmetry and geometry to create solo or even group works of art.
This outdoor lesson ties science, health, and math together (standards aligned for K, but all ages love this lesson). The Big Idea of Change Over Time is embedded as children explore patterns, symmetry, and impermanence while gaining the opportunity to gather natural ephemera.
Students can explore natural resources, erosion, community environmental health, and writing that deepens understanding of incorporating evidence and persuasion for an audience. The lesson/activity helps students visualize the paths of water and includes links to more teaching slides and a video.
Using nature as an “algorhythm,” find out how to determine the temperature by counting cricket chirps!
Some students prefer a blank page; use this model for students who need the visual cues of concentric circles.
Digital directions – plus a story – for teaching the sound mapping process.
Observation can deepen from the sense of hearing as well. Using deep listening through Sound Mapping strengthens focus as a skill and is known to calm the nervous system.
Writing prompts provide an open-ended and immediate way to focus. These turn the “great outdoors” into a discovery process full of observational and detailed writing. Give the page for student choice or provide prompts one at a time to teacher direct the writing goal.
For visual learners, this video explains it well.
Drawing puts new concepts into deep memory. This method puts the focus on — you guessed it — observation. Nature journaling doesn’t require drawing talent, and this method takes focus away from artistic ability and into the tiniest details of what we see. These instructions guide you with exactly what to say to your group.
A live-feed camera with a lot to see and hear at the Wildlife Management Area of Hog Island, VA. Bring the outdoors inside anytime.
