Pair our classic beginning naturalist training book with our core mentoring guide - for a terrific team!

Kamana One and Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature, 2nd Edition...

Kamana now available in Digital format!
(PDF pages: 278)
If you enjoy eBooks, save earth resources, shipping time and money with a digital Kamana! Our Kamana One book (also available in the Kamana One Resource Pack) and our Kamana Two Program binder are now available in digital format. Soon Kamana Three and Four will be ready as well.

Check out Kamana.org for our new Kamana Student Services program!

With your purchase (or gift!) of a Kamana program, you can receive a
FREE Introductory Month of Kamana Student Services through Kamana.org

Kamana One: Exploring Natural Mystery is our best selling home study course. Thousands have improved their awareness skills and knowledge of nature!

Kamana One embarks you on the Kamana journey and it only takes about a month to complete. It will bring you through two weeks of awareness exercises and six areas of ecological study using a field guide and inspiring audio narrated by Jon Young (see the two resources, below).

Kamana One is the beginning of our Kamana Naturalist Training Program--a four-level independent study program that covers the naturalist background needed to engage in the wilderness arts, including wildlife tracking, bird language, survival and native living skills, traditional herbalism, and naturalist mentoring. (Read more about Kamana One)

Kamana One uses two required resources:

1) The Seeing Though Native Eyes Audio Series (Read more about the CD series)

2) Readers Digest: North American Wildlife. (Read more about the field guide)

The Digital Kamana 1 Program Pack
Save up to $20 when you get Kamana 1 Digital bundled with the two required resources (print field guide and audio CD)! (Read more)

Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature:
For Kids of all Ages and their Mentors

by Jon Young, Ellen Haas and Evan McGown
Pgs: 576

Forward by Richard Louv: "Thanks to the creators of Coyote’s Guide, teachers, mentors and parents now have a powerful set of tools to help them with their task…
This is good medicine for nature-deficit disorder..."

-Richard Louv, author of the national bestseller Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder

150 additional pages • featuring full-color action photos • improved cross-referencing • indexing of routines and activities • and additional Affiliate resources

News from Co-author Ellen Haas:
"We’ve revised, amended, redesigned... full color, with loads of new photographs, sturdier cover stock, and improvements in icons and tabbing that allow the kind of cross-referencing you enjoy with a field guide. You’ll also find a thoughtful reconsideration of when to use the term “teacher” and when to use “mentor,” clarification of scientific references, updates to the Affiliates section and a full Index. The most stunning new feature is the facelift: an all-new cover design..."

Parents, teachers, counselors, and guides, this book is for you!

It reveals the strategy inside the mind of the coyote mentor and offers dozens of activities, so you can easily design amazing learning experiences that fit your plan, your people, and your place.

Coyote’s Guide sets fresh standards for environmental literacy that engages body, mind, and spirit.

"The nature activities in Coyote’s Guide are fantastic; I cannot wait to try them...This book has the power to change lives. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to share nature with children and adults."

              -Joseph Cornell, author of the international bestseller, Sharing Nature with Children

"Coyote’s Guide is nature education as it should be — mysterious, timeless, hopeful, evocative and playful."

-David Sobel, author of Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education

Who is this book for?
Until now, Wilderness Awareness School and its affiliates have passed on teachings about The Art of Mentoring and Coyote Teaching only through experiential workshops. Yet, from my desk at the center of the school’s office, I keep hearing the insistent pleas of countless amazing mentors out there who aren’t able to get here for a program, have students just waiting to get started, and want our blueprint for design and construction of a profound learning experience.
Your cries for help have called out Coyote’s Guide.

Bottom line, you feel deeply the value of direct experience with nature in your own life and want to transmit it to others. Some of you were fortunate to grow up free to roam and hunt and fish and build tree houses in the wild places near your home with parents and mentors who encouraged you – and you want to pass on the tradition. More of you are members of the first generation that didn’t have that privilege – and you want to resurrect the tradition.
Parents, teachers, counselors, guides, and mentors, all who find this book in your hand, Jon, Evan, and I have written it for you. We want you to be confident that Coyote’s Guide can be adapted to work wherever you are, in situations as diverse as we can imagine.
– Ellen Haas, Coauthor, Managing Editor

A Blueprint you can adapt to fit your situation…
Parents, teachers, counselors, guides, and mentors, this book is written for you. It provides a blueprint for you to easily design an amazing learning experience that fits your people and your place.

Ancient wisdom for teaching Nature Literacy…
Coyote Mentoring is the ancient, worldwide legacy of hunter-gatherer cultures who surrounded their children with “Invisible Schooling.” This way of teaching will hone students’ senses and connect their imagination to the natural world.

A fresh and edgy Curriculum Guide…
This Mentor’s Manual and Activities Guide is Coyote’s Guide because it speaks with a magical voice and issues a challenging invitation to improvise and mentor with a sparkle in the eye.

A set of 54 sparkling, field-tested Activities…
Each Activity is primed with a story and goes well beyond “How-to,” taking you “Inside the Mind of the Mentor” and out to “Alternatives and Extensions.”

The best of Jon Young…
With this book, Jon Young unveils the mentoring principles that underlie his classic works, Seeing Through Native Eyes and Kamana Naturalist Training Program, and finishes it off with an Afterword that puts Coyote in Context.

The Essential Manual for the No Child Left Inside movement…
The principles in this book are already at the heart of a vibrant educational movement that is spreading worldwide. 134 Affiliated learning communities and wilderness schools are listed. Join us!

12 pages of Suggested Reading Resources…
A huge bibliography of print and audio-visual resources, compiled by friends from all regions, offers something to fit your needs in the fields of Environmental Education, Primitive Skills, Field Identification, Natural History, Science, and Literature.

Feels like a Field Guide…
Keyed, tabbed, illustrated, and glossy, just like a field guide.

The Mentor’s Manual

Instills good habits of Nature Connection…
Leaves “No Child Inside.” Shifts our indoor Routines of Awareness outdoors. Develops in-depth 13 essential Core Routines for Nature Connection.

Uses Child Passions as Teaching Tools…
Tells the Adrenaline Secret: Shows how to use Games, Questioning, Storytelling, and Music-Making to fire up the passion for learning.

Offers Spirited Resources for Nature Literacy…
Aims for Meaningful Relationships with 8 species-groups of the Book of Nature: Hazards, Catchables, Trackables, Edibles,..and more!

Goes with the flow of the Natural Cycle…
Orients you to the Natural Cycle as you design your learning experience from Inspiration to Perspiration to Celebration to Integration…and round again.

Sets new standards for Environmental Education…
“If our end is restoring healthy connection between humans and the rest of nature, then our means of assessing success must be natural, vibrant, vital, and sustainable criteria.”

"Why is this book so important?"
The developed world we live in largely ignores the need for connection with nature. Many factors contribute to the trend that Richard Louv so compellingly describes as “nature deficit disorder.” The terrain of childhood is dominated more and more by indoor focus and technology. Fears of strangers and dangers keep children tightly supervised. Growing population replaces wilderness with houses and roads. Growing emphasis on test scores and schedules keeps kids busy in structured activities.

These things each have value. But collectively they result in no time left for children to bond with nature. Not only do kids get the short-end of the developmental stick, but the natural world has fewer people who know and love it, fewer adults who have nature built into their habits of awareness, and therefore fewer humans who care to be good tenders of their habitat.

Playful, meaningful connection with the wild world outdoors needs to be a fundamental ingredient of every childhood. We cannot let it invisibly slip away. We must consciously choose it for our children. We’ve never needed to more than now.

Coyote’s Guide is the Manual for the No Child Left Inside movement that can turn the
tide. It responds to an urgent need of parents, teachers, counselors and guides for practical help in reconnecting their kids to the natural world.

Why is this Coyote’s Guide?
This is Coyote’s Guide because it entices us off the beaten path, to experiment with creative approaches, to do something different from what's generally being tried.
Coyote goads us to have a true sense of play and abandon,—teasing us out of our usual routines to connect in an intimate and meaningful way with the natural world and our natural selves. We use a radical approach without textbooks or tests, engaging people in direct experience with the plants and animals just beyond the edge of their back yards. This book hopes to inspire you and coach you, the nature mentoring guide, into stretching your own creativity.

Guiding like Coyote requires that you get to know the people you mentor. You have to watch carefully for what will capture their curiosity, engage their natural gifts, and challenge them in ways they can handle in their personal learning journey. Look for their edges: the edge of their comfort zone, the edge of their awareness, the edge of their knowledge, the edge of their experience. Then, you can stretch and pull them to a new edge, and then another, deeper and deeper into a sense of comfort and kinship with the wildness of the natural world.

Finally, Coyote’s Guide encourages you to straddle both the human-made world with its vast scientific vocabulary and technology, and the instinctive, imagination-based world of our ancestors. Both worlds offer rich, educational potential. As Coyote Mentors, you will tap into zoology and botany textbooks, field guides, the scientific method, child development theories, and wildlife videos. Yet you will also explore the ancient cultural wisdom from around the world, its mythic animal stories, nature-based ceremonies, and tools for survival.

What is Invisible School?
A long, long time ago, maybe two hundred thousand years ago, and in a few places still today, the native people who lived off their land schooled their children – but they did it invisibly. Our ancestors’ children didn’t go to school. School surrounded them. Nature was a living teacher. There were many relatives for every child and every relative was a mentor. Stories filled the air, games and laughter filled the days, and ceremonies of gratitude filled mundane lives.

This Guide passes on this method of invisible schooling, so that people will connect with nature without knowing it. They'll soak up the language of plants and animals as naturally as any of us learned our native language. Do you remember learning to talk? Probably not. Spoken language happened around you all the time, and allowed you to experiment with words, make mistakes, and every single day grow vocabulary. Mentoring with the language of nature happens just the same. With stories, games, songs, place-names, animal names, and more, you invisibly and subtly stretch your students’ language edges.
The invisible school of nature proves to be more than just effective, it is also fun, healing, and empowering. Like the Coyote whose methods at first seem unorthodox or even foolish, in the end, it works better than anyone could dream.

How is this curriculum guide organized?
It’s a field guide and a cookbook, made of a Mentor’s Manual and an Activities Guide.

Mentor’s Manual
Shifting Routines and Core Routines of Nature Connection explain the practices that learners do. Repeating these invisibly and visibly all the time, in every way and in every situation, develops good habits for connecting with nature.

Child Passions as Teaching Tools, Questioning and Answering, Storytelling, and Music Making highlight the universal instincts that children and playful adults possess, and show how to use these as doorways through which Core Routines and knowledge of natural history may enter the lives of "children from 1 to 100," that is, everyone.

Book of Nature points to the most fertile places to start when connecting people with natural history. It narrows down the infinite possibilities by emphasizing meaningful relationships.

Natural Cycle and Learning and Teaching Cycles convey a vision of how energies move through a day, a week, or a lifetime, giving you a feel for the rhythm that allows you both to plan and improvise for success.

Indicators of Awareness paints a handful of universal character traits fostered through connecting with nature. They describe the goals of Coyote Mentoring in terms of personal growth that emerges naturally through practicing these routines and activities.

Activities Guide:
Activities begin with a Primer Story, provide a brief How-To, take you Inside the Mind of the Mentor, and expand into Alternatives and Extensions. Each activity cross-references to the Mentor’s Manual. As you choose activities for your lesson plan, consider which Core Routines to practice through the activity, which Child Passions to tap into, which parts of the Book of Nature could be emphasized, where the activity fits in the Natural Cycle, and which Indicators of Awareness you want to cultivate. This interweaving allows you to create, adapt, or otherwise "cook" your own activities in your own local ecosystem.

"Can parents use this book?"
Totally! Coyote theory and practice has been field tested with parents for decades. This book is “for kids of all ages” because it teaches the parents as well as the kids how to wake up childlike curiosity to explore, imitate, and get down and dirty with the Book of Nature.

"Does this book work for environmental educators?"
This book was written with creative classroom teachers in mind. It’s like a cookbook with recipes you can easily adapt to fit your schools’ learning goals. We offer you a bunch of tools and strip them down to underlying principles that you can apply to your situation. The Mentor’s Manual teaches the “naturalist intelligence” and “nature literacy” through “meaningful connection” with hazards, catchables, mammal, plants, trees, birds, ecological indicators, and heritage species. This Activities Guide can work wonders for teachers who can meet the challenge of getting their kids outside the classroom walls.

What if it’s too dangerous to send my kids to a Sit Spot?
Really good question. No easy answer.

Coyote’s essential Core Routine is the Sit Spot: “Find one place in our natural world that you visit all the time and get to know it as your best friend. Let this be a place where you learn to sit still – alone, often, and quietly – This will become your place of intimate connection with nature.”

We discuss at length the importance and the difficulty of making Sit Spot work, in both the Mentors Manual and the Activities Guide. The Sit may not be still, and the Spot may not be wild, and you may not be truly alone, but we know you can find a way to make Sit Spot a Core Routine.

What if I have a class of 30 kids and only one teacher?
You can’t take 30 kids into the woods with only one adult. It’s bad for the woods and boring for the kids. The solution is to enlist a Teaching Team or cultivate a Village of Relatives to help you out. See our discussion of Cooperative Learning Groups and Orientation for Program Management.

What if my children don’t want me as their teacher?
You may need to Shift your Routines. If you’re a tall parent who guides from the front, get down on all fours and corral from behind. If you like to give answers, shift into questioning. If you have goals and deadlines, try wandering for a while. Become childlike and let your children and Mother Nature do most of the teaching.

What if I have to meet essential Learning Goals for Science Education?
Coyote’s approach highly values the scientific method and puts a premium on questioning, exploring, experimenting, and critical thinking. Use the Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why of Tracking as a teaching tool, track how everything is connected to everything, and bring field questions into the lab and field guide library.

What if I want to teach my students Language Arts with nature as an integrating context?
The Book of Nature is rife with character, setting, plot and theme, field guides are magnificent literature, and natural history writing is a widespread and eloquent genre. See our discussions of the Core Routines of Story of the Day, Exploring Field Guides, and Journaling.

What if I my religious beliefs are challenged by this book?
Coyote’s Guide is ultimately about deepening our spiritual connection with nature, community, and self. It emphasizes peacefulness, awe, reverence, and thanksgiving along with respectfulness, caring and tending. Its encourages appreciation of the universal qualities of the Natural Cycle. All these are spiritual emphases found at the core of religions throughout time across the world. They will probably deepen, not distract from, your religious beliefs.

What if I already know all this stuff?
Burn This Book
This book is not for anyone to make a banner out of,
to quote at length as some new bible.
It is a gentle companion in your own process,
a process of dancing alive in the moment
With children, squirrel tracks and clouds, a falling leaf.
If anything, let this book bump you along
into your own way of doing things,
into your own way of being the educator you already are.
This book will teach you a few dances,
but we really want you to remember the place
where dances are made, before the first step.

When you start to move to your own steps,
Burn this book. Please.
– Evan McGown, coauthor, storyteller

What’s Coming Next?
Your journey as a mentor to facilitate nature connection in children and adults alike is just beginning, As your powers grow, you will begin to discover a need to foster a village culture that holds, protects, and integrates the accumulated understanding of what it means to be a human in deep connection with nature. The work of the cultural mentor in creating Regenerative Mentoring Villages is the subject of our next book.
- Jon Young, coauthor, founder of Wilderness Awareness School and many affiliates