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-Spend more than 53 hours a week on "entertainment media"
-View nature more as an abstraction than as a physical reality

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Getting Kids into Nature Shows Improvement In...

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Getting Kids into Nature Shows Improvement In...

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-ADHD
-Learning Ability
-Creativity
-Mental, Psychological & Spiritual Health

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Example of how to participate in Citizen Science, with Monarch Butterflies

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Would you like to get involved with Citizen Science in your own backyard? There are some simple things that average citizens can do to support the Monarch population.
Monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed, and caterpillars only eat milkweed. But humans don't seem to like milkweed very much and are cutting it down for various reasons. Sometimes humans cut down milkweed in order to build houses, buildings and streets. Sometimes the milkweed is cut down when trees are removed to harvest the wood. In recent years there have been a lot of wildfires that have destroyed a lot of milkweed. Humans cut milkweed down in their own yards because it doesn't smell very good or they think it is a weed. But these humans don't realize that monarch butterflies need the milkweed in order to survive, and the monarch butterfly population is dwindling. When adult monarch butterflies migrate from their overwintering grounds in spring, the females begin a search for a suitable place to lay their eggs.

Why should we care about helping Monarchs? Besides being amazing and interesting insects, they are major pollinators like bees. They help the environment. You can help Monarchs by planting a some milkweed.

Female monarchs lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed plants, one of the critical roles it plays in monarch survival. Female monarchs will actually taste the leaf to make sure it's suitable milkweed, before laying her eggs. Let's take a visual journey through the monarch life cycle!

Stage 1: Egg

If you take a close look at milkweed pods and leaves in your garden, you may find monarch eggs. And if you find one, there are likely more. Female monarchs lay between 400 and 1200 eggs throughout their lifetime. It takes about four days for an egg to hatch. The monarch hatchling will eat its eggshell, which is filled with nutrients, and then the milkweed leaf.

Stage 2: Caterpillar (larva)

Once the caterpillar hatches, it grows rapidly. It's estimated that in two weeks, the caterpillar will be 3,000 times larger than the day it hatches. Monarch caterpillars shed their exoskeleton (or molt) as they grow. The black thing that pops off at the end of the video is the head capsule.

Stage 3: Chrysalis When the caterpillar is fully grown, it will find a suitable place to make its chrysalis. It will attach a wad of silk and hang from it, upside down (in a "J"). It spends approximately 18 hours in this position (depending on environmental factors). As you can see in the video, the exoskeleton splits near its head and the caterpillar wiggles to discard it.

As the monarch sheds its exoskeleton for the final time as a caterpillar, it forms a chrysalis. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar begins its transformation into a butterfly. The first few hours of the chrysalis (pupa) stage is delicate, as the exoskeleton is soft and weak. Stage 4: Butterfly After 8-10 days, you'll see the monarch wing colors and patterns quite clearly. This is when the monarch is ready to emerge from the chrysalis. The monarch pushes its way out, and grabs hold of the exoskeleton. At first the monarch looks unbalanced, with a huge abdomen and tiny, folded wings. Within minutes the wings expand to their full size. The butterfly waits about an hour or so to dry its wings and prepare for flight.

How You Can Help

Help monarch butterflies and other fall migrants by becoming a

You can get involved with Citizen Science by recording your sightings of Monarchs and even by reporting the planting of milkweed. Journey North makes this as easy as a couple of clicks to add your data. You can also view data that other citizens have added. Your own family can easily get involved with Citizen Science in which amateur scientists and citizens record and report their sightings and contribute as citizens to scientific research.

Here I am planting some milkweed. I will report my findings to Journey North

I have several resources in my store that are for teaching life cycle of a butterfly. I like centers for you children pre k-1st grade.

For students 3rd grade-5th grade I like to have them read a nonfiction text passage about Life Cycle of the Butterfly and put some items in their interactive notebooks.

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Would you like to get involved with Citizen Science in your own backyard? There are some simple things that average citizens can do to support the Monarch population. Monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed, and caterpillars only eat milkweed. But humans don't seem to like milkweed very much and are cutting it down for various reasons.

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-Public participation in scientific research
-List of websites to help you participate in research

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Citizen Science is scientific research conducted in whole or in part by amateur or non professional scientists. You might think of it as public participation in scientific research.
And Citizen Science can be a great tool for teachers!
There are all kinds of resources and free tools and
programs set up and available for teachers, students, parents and anyone interested.

Let's say you have noticed that robins migrate into your neighborhood every spring. You could use this site
Journey North Robins to record your observations of when you hear the first robin of the spring and when you see the first robin of the spring. Other people also enter data from their location and maps are generated on an ongoing basis.

Beginning in January, citizen scientists across North America are invited to report theirPlease first robin of spring, report these observations. waves of migrating robins, and the first robin song of spring. Share data to help scientists understand how robins respond to climate and changing seasons. Explore the robin's life cycle, ecology, habitat, and conservation needs.

The site also provides research (informational text) on the particular species, checklists and observation forms. You can be involved just briefly, with simple data entry and looking at the results, or you can be involved with complete lessons and engaging units for your students.

There are many other opportunities for citizen science. Journey North has opportunities to study all kinds of wildlife migration and seasonal change. https://www.learner.org/jnorth/ Everything from tracking the migration of grey whales or monarch butterflies to sunlight and seasons is available.

Here are a few more resources for citizen science:

Citizen Science is a great way to get you, your students, your children and families involved in simple scientific research. It only takes a couple of clicks to enter simple observations and it is fun!

If you like this blog post about Citizen Science, you will love how to make a field journal out of an envelope. Click here for simple step by step directions Field Journal Out of an Envelope

You might also like my butterfly life cycle resources:

Kinder Centers for Life Cycle of a Butterfly

Please share this blog post! Thank you for reading.

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Citizen Science is scientific research conducted in whole or in part by amateur or non professional scientists. You might think of it as public participation in scientific research. And Citizen Science can be a great tool for teachers! There are all kinds of resources and free tools and programs set up and available for teachers, students, parents and anyone interested.

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-Children & Nature Network (C&NN)
-Natural Teachers Network

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-When kids stop going into the natural world to play

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As a boy growing up on the edge of the Kansas City suburbs, Richard Louv could walk out of the back door of his parents' house right into a cornfield, and from there into the woods. So he did. A lot. And as a result, he says, half a century later, "I have a place in my heart that I go to. It's that cornfield, and those woods."

It's now five years since Louv published Last Child in the Woods, a huge and unexpected US bestseller that explores what happens, to individuals and society, when kids stop going out into the natural world to play ("nature deficit disorder" he called it - the term has caught on). Great things have happened since, of which more shortly, but Louv's core question remains the same: will future generations of children have that place to go to?

It's worth asking. I grew up about a decade later than Louv, in a slightly scruffy village on the outer fringes of London. Like him, I had a field at the bottom of the garden and woods beyond the field, and a stream in the woods. I spent a lot of time in all three, dissecting cowpats, climbing trees, building dens and dams, tormenting sticklebacks, being Will Scarlet or Hawkeye or (if no one was looking) an Ent.

For some reason I relate all this to Louv within three minutes of meeting him (he invites it, I think). He is entirely unsurprised. The thing is, I say, as he nods, that I acquired, without necessarily meaning to, a certain familiarity with - even a knowledge of - the natural world. I could tell a beech from a birch, a jackdaw from a jay, cow parsley from catkins. I became a budding birdwatcher.

And even if my parents sold up and moved away 30 years ago and more, that field and those woods are, in some large and largely unsayable way, a very important part of me. "You owned them," says Louv, approvingly, a grey-haired and avuncular figure on the sofa.

"It's that sense of ownership that's important - ownership of nature. How many children get that now? For this generation, nature is more of an abstraction than a physical reality. Kids today can tell you about the Amazon rainforest, but not about the last time they went into a wood alone. Nature is something to watch from a distance, something to consume. Something very profound has happened in children's relationship to nature."

He's right, of course. I only have to look at my oldest, now nearly 10: his abiding passions are a long way from mine at his age and nature and wildlife, do not currently rank among them. Not for want of trying on my part, I hasten to add; just, well, we live in the city. We don't have a field at the bottom of the garden and if we did I'm not entirely sure we'd be happy letting him out into it. Plus there's the TV, the Nintendo, the computer. You know how it is.

It's a syndrome Louv, a newspaperman and well-regarded columnist for most of his career, first encountered when researching another book in the late 1980s; one that is perhaps best summed up by the words of the anonymous San Diego pre-teen who told him back then: "I like to play indoors better, cos that's where all the electrical outlets are." A recent report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average eight to 18-year-old American now spends more than 53 hours a week using "entertainment media", up from 44 hours five years ago.

But it's not just video games that are responsible. "Video games draw kids inside, but what pushes them inside is their parents' fear: of traffic, certainly, but also of abduction and abuse - stranger danger. Which is interesting, because in the US at least, the number of abductions by strangers has been falling steadily for the past 20 years. I'm not saying there's no risk out there - there is, even in nature. But it's a small risk. And kids need a little risk," he says.

Those figures hold up here as well: of the UK's 11m children, on average 11 are killed by a stranger each year - a figure that has remained stable since the 1970s.

There are other factors, Louv adds: children's time is so much more pressured these days. All those improving after-school activities, plus the very modern notion that a kid's time must be put to constructive use - no room for just hanging out in the woods. Not to mention health and safety.

In short, for a whole range of reasons we no longer let our kids anywhere near the natural world on their own: a 2007 survey by the Children's Society found that 43% of adult respondents believe children should not be allowed outdoors unsupervised before they are 14. Not for them the joys of den-building or tree-climbing. More children, it seems, are now admitted to British hospitals for injuries incurred falling out of bed than falling out of trees. "Broken bones," Louv notes, "used to be a rite of passage for children. Now all paediatricians see are cases of obesity and repetitive strain injury."

Does it matter? It does, says Louv forcefully, and for several reasons: obesity is just the most visible of them, but there's also an increasing body of research showing that time spent in the natural world has a significant impact on more than physical wellbeing. "Kids can grow fine up without nature," says Louv, "but with it, there are marked improvements in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning ability, creativity and mental, psychological and spiritual health. When you consider that in some US schools, up to 30% of boys are now on Ritalin ... I've lost count of the number of teachers and youth leaders who have told me how different kids become when you get them out into nature. Trouble-makers become leaders. Nature is their Ritalin."

Plus, who's going to be bothered looking after the planet if there's no one left with any understanding of, interest in or connection to their natural environment? "What we're doing instead is instilling in kids a kind of ecophobia," Louv argues. "We're overloading them with scenarios of fear and disaster - worry about the 'environment' is crushing kids' relationship with nature."

It's not, though, exclusively bad news. Since Last Child was first published in the US in 2005, and here three years later, interest in nature deficit disorder - not, Louv stresses, a "known medical condition", more a "disorder of society" - has increased beyond his wildest imaginings. "I've been blown away by the response," he says. "I knew it would push a button, but not to this extent. There's quite plainly a very primal nature to this issue that touches people very deeply."

It has led to a foundation, the Children & Nature Network (C&NN) - childrenandnature.org) - aimed at collating and disseminating a growing body of research in the field and building "a movement to reconnect children and nature". Some 73 regional C&NN campaigns have been launched across the US and Canada, and interest has been fanned from the UK to Kenya.

There's a Natural Teachers Network, a natural leaders programme aimed at young people and 74 family nature clubs have been founded around the country to help families get out into the wild together. Progress is being made at a more official level, too. Louv is delighted to be delivering the keynote speech at the American Academy of Pediatrics' upcoming annual conference. Two weeks ago, the head of Portland city parks department in Oregon announced a partnership with the city's health services: GPs will start formally prescribing "family time" to be spent in a park, the parks department will check they show up, and the health department will study the results.

As the majority of us now live in cities, Louv is becoming more and more involved in the burgeoning debate around "nearby nature" - working to ensure that wherever possible, urban design starts incorporating nature in ways it hasn't until now; exploring ideas of eco-villages, urban wildlife corridors and, more recently, child corridors; nature trails instead of golf courses; natural regeneration plans for abandoned malls and inner-city wastelands.

The Bush and Obama administrations have both taken his work gratifyingly seriously. "I recently," he says modestly, "got invited to Carmel by Clint Eastwood to meet with developers and think about ways to connect children to nature, rather than separate them." Over here, he's holding high-level meetings with the National Trust and Natural England. The battle is by no means won, but Louv senses that something is taking off. Maybe it's not too much to hope that half a century hence, a few more of today's kids will have a place in their hearts they can go to.
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As a boy growing up on the edge of the Kansas City suburbs, Richard Louv could walk out of the back door of his parents' house right into a cornfield, and from there into the woods. So he did. A lot.