Children in Nature Pack2: CG2, ChildhoodNat, SharNature
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Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature,
Childhood and Nature and Sharing Nature with Children...
Childhood and Nature:
Design Principles for Educators
by David Sobel
Pgs: 168
Public discussions of global climate change and other
threats to the planet are making children more aware of environmental issues.
As increasing numbers of kids come to school wishing to take action, educators
want to know how to teach in a way that fosters a love of nature and
an understanding of the complexity and seriousness of these issues.
In Childhood and Nature,
noted educator David Sobel makes the case that meaningful connections with the
natural world don't begin in the rainforest or arctic, but in our own backyards
and communities. Based on his observations of recurrent play themes around the
world, Sobel articulates seven design principles that
can guide teachers in structuring learning experiences for
children. Place-based education projects that make effective use of
the principles are detailed throughout the book. And while engaged in these
projects, students learn language arts, math, science, social studies, as well
as essential problem-solving and social skills through involvement with nature
and their communities.
The pressures of test preparation, standards, and curriculum frameworks
often reduce the study of nature and the environment to a set of facts and general
concepts. However, as Childhood and Nature demonstrates, linking
curriculum with an engagement in the real world not only provides students
with the thinking skills needed for whatever test comes their way, but also
helps them grow into responsible citizens and stewards of the earth.
David T. Sobel is the director of Teacher Certification Programs in the education department and director of the Center for Place-Based Education at Antioch University New England in New Hampshire.
Prior to 1997, he served as the chairperson of the department for a dozen years. He was one of the founders of The Harrisville Children's Center and has served on the board of public and private schools. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice and has served as a correspondent for Orion Magazine.
His published books include Children's Special Places, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education, Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years and Place-based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities. His articles examine the relationship between child development, school curriculum and place-based education. He was the winner of a 1991 Education Press Award.
David is currently director of Project CO-SEED (Community-based School Environmental Education). This project creates partnerships between communities, school districts and environmental organizations in an effort to collaboratively improve schools and support community development.
Sharing Nature with Children
by Joseph Cornell
Pgs: 172
An appreciation for the complex and interrelated life forms that comprise the exosphere of their environments is a solid basis to establish a life-long enthusiasm for nature and the out-of-doors, as well as a lasting commitment to environmental issues and concerns.
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:
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
