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Manitoba Teacher's Association definition of Nature Literacy

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Manitoba Teacher's Association definition of Nature Literacy

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Ag for Life

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Through close collaboration with stakeholders, Ag for Life will develop, expand and offer curriculum-based educational programming that will serve to improve farm safety and to build a genuine understanding and appreciation for the role agriculture plays in society, the environment and the economy.

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Two years ago Rick Van Noy packed his car and, with his two children, drove 800 miles from their home in Virginia to Boothbay Harbor in Maine. The children wanted to learn about tide pools. Once there, they witnessed minnows, crabs, mussels and sea urchins.

"We found some exquisite creatures, some we couldn't even name," Mr. Van Noy says.

It was no accident his children - son Sam,10, and daughter Elliot, 8 - instigated such a long trek to explore the natural world. Mr. Van Noy, an associate professor of English at Radford University in Virginia, has sought, and succeeded, to provide his children with the experiences of being outdoors and away from computer screens and video games.

He has written a book, A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons (University of Georgia Press, $16.95), that chronicles his attempt to get his children outside. Mr. Van Noy will discuss and read from his book at the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed in Pennington June 26.

"The program is part of a larger mission by the Watershed Association to connect children to nature," Communications Manager Gwen McNamara says. The Watershed is also offering information sessions for parents in a companion series called "No Child Left Inside," which in the coming months will visit local communities throughout central New Jersey.

Both the Watershed and Mr. Van Noy were inspired by Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from nature deficit disorder (Algonquin Books,...

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Book Chronicles Dad Connecting Kids with Nature

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Two years ago Rick Van Noy packed his car and, with his two children, drove 800 miles from their home in Virginia to Boothbay Harbor in Maine. The children wanted to learn about tide pools. Once there, they witnessed minnows, crabs, mussels and sea urchins.

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Books about Nature Literacy

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Literacy and the Great Outdoors: 10 Outdoor Literacy Ideas

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There's no reason learning the ABCs needs to be limited to an indoor space. In fact, there are lots of ways to encourage a love of reading and writing by spending time outside. Here are ten literacy activities I've enjoyed with my own two sons - one of whom is 8 (and an avid reader) and the other who is 5 (and not quite a full-fledged reader yet).

1. Read outside
Grab a few books and head outside. Bring along a blanket to sit on, find a tree to lean up against or cuddle up in an outdoor fort. Read together or allow your child time to him or herself - whichever feels appropriate.

2. Paint alphabet rocks
Gather up some rocks from around the neighborhood or a local park. You can create a set of alphabet rocks by painting letters on each rock with acrylic paint. Choose a variety of colors or make a set of capital letters in one color, lowercase letters in another.

3. Make story stones
More drawing on rocks - this time using pictures instead of letters. Create nature-themed images such as animals, flowers, insects and the elements. Then take turns telling stories using the stones as prompts.

4. Create your own nature ABC book
Go on a nature hunt with your little one - around your neighborhood, backyard, park, garden, local zoo or aquarium. Look for something to represent each letter of the alphabet. Then take a picture of that image. Print out the photos and place them in a dedicated album to form your very own ABC book. Add letters, words and other facts as desired.

5. Use nature for letter making
Kids just learning their letters will have fun shaping letters using items found in nature such as rocks, sticks or flower petals.

6. Go on a scavenger hunt
If your child isn't yet reading, create cards with pictures of items to find and the corresponding words underneath (you can do the same with numbers of items and shapes as well). Kids already reading can search for items using a written list instead.

7. Keep a nature journal
While a traditional nature journal usually focuses on discoveries and sketches, ours include any kind of writing the kids want to include about their outdoor adventures.

For example, this summer I encouraged my sons to keep a summer adventure journal. The 5 year old wrote one sentence and a picture with each entry. (He told me what he wanted to write and I spelled it out for him; he wrote all his own letters). The 8 year old sketched too but also wrote at least a paragraph.

8. Discover field guides
My 5 year old is a self-proclaimed animal rescuer and as such is now consumed with learning about all things animal. In addition to traditional children's books about animals we're also reading field guides. Choose guides with quality photos and simple facts. There are even field guides designed just for kids.

9. Make a backyard field guide
Once young children are familiar with field guide basics, try making your own. Children can practice drawing, letter writing and more as they create their own backyard field guide. Keep it general or focus on your child's specific interests, such as a bird book, animal book or flower guide.

10. Read about nature indoors
If your child has a specific interest in the great outdoors - like my self-proclaimed animal rescuer - encourage that passion by reading about it whenever you normally read together. Take advantage of your local library to vary up your titles, or stick with a few old favorites.
What creative ways do you use to encourage of a love of reading in your child? Related Posts
Debi Huang is a Los Angeles, CA-based wife, mom and adventure guide for two young boys. She writes about connecting kids and families with nature in the backyard and beyond.

Read more of Debi's adventures at http://www.goexplorenature.com/.

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10 Outdoor Literacy Activities: Literacy and the Great Outdoors

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There's no reason learning the ABCs needs to be limited to an indoor space. In fact, there are lots of ways to encourage a love of reading and writing by spending time outside.

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Discovering natural classrooms

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For many, the classroom is an alienating place. There are environmental factors that play into this (and monetary factors that play into these environmental ones). There are stigmas, expectations, and traditions that may interfere with learning. In attending and visiting various college campuses around the country I frequently see the same colorless, characterless spaces, each one artificially illuminated by fluorescent light. In fact, I dare you to type "schools look like" into Google and see how the program autocompletes the thought. Or fill it in yourself. If you have spent enough time near the institution, it is likely you and the search algorithm will pick up on the same cultural trend: schools look like prisons. And by observing the current boom in 21st century classroom design companies, I know that the market (and incidentally, Foucault) agrees with me.

More troubling, however, are the less visible cultural biases that manifest in these traditional classroom spaces. When left unmodified, the "default settings" and practices of today's classrooms may be further marginalizing diverse student populations. One scholar, Mildred Jordan, observes a variety of "negative affects that a mainstream American educational experience can have on African American and other minority students." In fact, Jordan goes as far as to suggest that, "the behavior of Black students is often seen as being disruptive rather than an expression of their own cultural styles." While this assertion is troublesome enough, I want to argue further that the traditional classroom doesn't even capture the needs of the mainstream student well. The Gallup survey states that student engagement at the high school level is as low as 4 in 10 students. With classroom disengagement rates soaring, it appears that no class, race, or culture has discovered immunity (albeit disproportionately affecting marginalized populations). According to a recently released report, even the teachers are becoming increasingly disengaged with the classroom, lacking the "energy, insights, and resilience that effective teaching" requires. And it's the students who pay the price.

It's time for a change. As an educator, this is the thought that has been reverberating through my mind for the past several months. I work at an after-school tutoring center, which has its own environmental shortcomings (the type where you plop ten tables on a basketball floor and call it a learning center). The need for change quite literally surrounds me. It haunts me within the cold, drafty grey-walled tutoring center and it gains credence every time I receive a disheartening email from one of my student's teachers, suggesting that the reason for such a low grade is the student's disengagement in the classroom. Establishing a "welcoming environment" has even become a regular topic of discussion within our organization, although little action is emerging as a result. By the time the sun finally reared its head in the Pacific Northwest, I had finally had it: the students would leave an eight-hour school day in classrooms lacking any personal or cultural relevance and then visit a tutoring center with a similar aesthetic for three more hours. It was really time for change.

With a folding table pinched under my arm, I headed out the backdoor of the tutoring center, followed quickly by a stack of chairs, a second table and - later - a beanbag. This is how outdoor tutoring began. While the ten-foot yard between our property and the neighbor's backyard is far from ideal, it offered the students an alternative, a way of escaping classroom burnout; further, it offered me a way of escaping an overcrowded office and avoiding classroom burnout.

The cost of this learning environment transformation was nil. My time investment is just slightly higher, requiring two-to-three minutes at the beginning and end of each day to reorganize the space. I didn't spend extensive time politicking or bureaucratizing; I simply grabbed what I needed to grab and tossed it on the lawn on a sunny day. I cannot cite the pedagogues that assert the benefits of this environment (although I imagine Dewey and Freire would be proud), nor can I graph the productivity of the students who choose to use this space (although it was recommended I try). What I do know, however, is that many of the students we serve prefer this outdoor learning environment, and this is where things get interesting.

In this seemingly small act of offering two learning environments - indoor and outdoor - a deeply problematic assumption surfaces. For perhaps the first time in these students' lives, they were intentionally given the freedom to decide what learning looks like and where it happens. I took a risk and said, "learning happens everywhere." I recognize that as educators we can and should shift the learning from traditional classrooms to places where we see the most engagement. In this case, I blended an environment encouraging creativity and play with a task in desperate need of engagement: sun-speckled grass and academic study. But there are other environments, too, some of which have been around for longer than the University itself. Sports, for example, offer a natural space for learning and practicing teamwork and solidarity. Still others evolve with technology, such as immersive games as a place to learn about language, identity, and cultural studies.

It is useful to imagine an environment in which the content you hope to teach emerges organically. It most cases, this will not be the traditional classroom.

In just three weeks of opening up this new space (now dubbed the "freedom annex"), I've seen some pretty encouraging results. Aside from holding a number of our administrative meetings outdoors, which simply has a much more positive vibe, this open space provides diversity to our learning environment. For instance, the high school Junior who spends break time at tutoring constructing a sword out of an old fence and duct tape can now store his creation in the ground beside him. And this matters. For two weeks inside the tutoring center he struggled to generate the eight poems required of an English class assignment. The assignment was late and the student was beginning to feel discouraged. Outside, however, inspired by his extracurricular creation, the project took only a couple of hours. The play sword became a recurring symbol in his creative writing assignment and even encouraged me to write along, producing this summarizing haiku:

A stick in the mud
Unearthed and held towards the sky
Is a stick no more.

Elsewhere on the lawn, two students, a Sophomore and a Freshman, share a beanbag set in the sun. They each cradle an 800-page textbook like a child cradles a picture book (or an iPad). They are reading Shakespeare, which is not easy for either of them. Looking down at the text, they see:

"How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art,
If any of my kinsmen find thee here,"(Romeo and Juilet).

This is not a language, or for that matter a culture, these students recognize. Yet, as many Romantic poets suggest, nature encourages imagination. Looking up from the text, the students see a fence - itself visibly hard to climb - hidden behind some shrubs, the foraging and clucking of backyard chickens just beyond. Nature set the stage better than any rough sketch on scratch paper could. Despite four hundred years of distance, Shakespeare becomes at least a little bit less abstract. Of course, I mustn't make too much of this comparison or I'll soon find myself unwittingly advocating a return to those concrete classrooms in time for the tomb scene in Act V.

Whenever possible, learning environments must be hybrid. Achieving this goal is challenging. Educators are met with a variety of material, spatial, economic, temporal, and administrative barriers. To teach class in nature for a day is to give up the affordance for wifi and many other technologies. Further, as I have discovered, it favors students without allergies and in many cases relies unintentionally upon ableist assumptions. I know that an outdoor learning environment may increase learning challenges for as many students as the traditional classrooms; yet, I challenge you all to experiment with such spaces when it be possible. More importantly, there is a need for educators to critically reflect on the spaces available (or could make available) to them and reconfigure them to more overtly student-centered environments.

Reflecting back on my time in classrooms, I recall a rather large number of occasions where the instructor (sometimes this was me) knowingly sacrificed student engagement for content delivery. Individual class periods feel bound by the syllabus and the daily content must be delivered before class lets out - even if this means speaking it at the backs of students as they walk out. Looking forward, I imagine a different sort of classroom dynamic and am optimistic that I will be more cognizant of the needs of my students. This means, for me, a lot less content per day, cutting my delivery time down significantly to reserve 50% of each class to engage in more active thought processes. I recognize that the environment that I teach in is also the space that students are required to learn in. It is a collective space, and must be treated as one. It is within the power of every educator to modify that space - albeit sometimes only by a little - to make it as inviting and engaging as possible.

Question the learning environment in which you teach. If the only reason you are in that space is because the University told you so, know that you can do it better. Accepting generic classrooms is the physical equivalent to using default settings - and, as every gamer recognizes sooner or later: default settings are never optimal. A classroom must be customized to meet the needs of its population, teacher and students alike. Meaningful environmental change can be created with or without administrative support and with minimal time and monetary investment. It begins by listening to your students and channeling their cultural styles into an effective classroom dynamic.

I challenge you to discover the natural classrooms of the world. Do not limit yourself, your pedagogy, or your methodology to a single place or process. Let learning be as diverse as your student population. Encourage your students to share moments of enlightenment, discovery, and play. Ask about the classroom atmosphere. Have your students pick where to meet on occasion, or how to arrange the class. Host office hours outdoors, or schedule a conference where you walk and talk (especially if you share a tiny, contingent faculty office, as many adjuncts and TAs do). Find occasions to mix things up. If all environments are learning environments, why is it, then, that we so often limit ourselves to just the same one, over and over? I think it's time for a change of scenery.

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Discovering Natural Classrooms: Hybrid Collective Learning Spaces | Hybrid Pedagogy

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For many, the classroom is an alienating place. There are environmental factors that play into this (and monetary factors that play into these environmental ones). There are stigmas, expectations, and traditions that may interfere with learning. In attending and visiting various college campuses around the country I frequently see the same colorless, characterless spaces, each one artificially illuminated by fluorescent light.

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Awareness-Nature Literacy - Remedy for Institutionalized Minds

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http://www.primitiveskills.com Outdoor Education and primitive skills teaching strategies are demonstrated as they unfold in "the back yard". Nature literacy, forest bathing, paleo, rewilding, it all comes down to "dirt time".

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Suggestions for increasing nature literacy

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Experiencing Literacy in Nature | This IS Literacy

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Over the past few years some writers and educators have raised concerns about how children are spending less time exploring and playing in nature. In the 2006 book Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv pulls together some recent research to show that North American children have, in fact, been spending progressively less unstructured time exploring nature.

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Sight Word Scavenger Hunt

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Sight Word Scavenger Hunt

We started practicing sight words. One day we took them outside for a little movement and learning.

Sight Word Scavenger Hunt

I wrote our sight words on the sidewalk and had the kids match them up with our cards. They jumped on the word as I called it out and then could put the card on top. This was a good warm-up for our Scavenger Hunt.

Big Sister went off and closed her eyes so she couldn't see (with a little peeking...) and I hid the cards in different places in our yard.

When all of the cards were hidden, I had her come back to the sidewalk and I would say one of the words. She ran off and tried to find the word.

We had sight words hidden all over! The kids had so much fun with this. Even Little Guy, who hasn't been practicing the sight words, got in to the action. He loved helping Big Sister hide the words for me to find too.

When it was my turn to find the words, Big Sister would read one of the words on the sidewalk and I had to go find it. I would ask her, "is this pan...?" So she could read the word on the card, too.

After the Sidewalk Sight Words and Scavenger Hunt, we put the cards in the water bin with some bird seed for fun sensory play.

We've been doing a bunch of different activities with our sight words. Watch this space for more learning ideas :)

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We started practicing sight words. One day we took them outside for a little movement and learning. I wrote our sight words on the sidewalk and had the kids match them up with our cards. They jumped on the word as I called it out and then could put the card on top.

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Ideas and links for Nature Literacy activities

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Find and save recipes, parenting hacks, style inspiration and other ideas to try.

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Outdoor Pre-Reading Activity for New Readers

We're back to join the All Things Kids bloggers with this month's series. We're talking about Fall and Outdoor fun with the kids. We are a family that plays outside every.single. day. Friends at church have said to us, "Wow you guys are tan, you must spend a lot of time outside"... Yep! We do. (with sunscreen, don't worry haha)

So, when we realized that this month's series post is all about outdoor play this fall, we were beyond excited! Getting outside with littles is necessary for the kids and for mama. Otherwise, we have a tornado of toys in the house and children bouncing off the walls and each other. Well, those things happen regardless, but the fresh air and yard to run in help. A lot.

We made an outdoor scavenger hunt for early readers and pre-readers. This literacy activity would be perfect for any time of year, but there's something extra crispy and fun about playing outside in the Fall. We took the letters outside for letter learning and word sounding. This isn't our first outdoor literacy activity, We loved our sight word scavenger hunt.

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.

Using Clothes Pins in Learning

We started with a bunch of wooden spring clothes pins . We use these clothes pins in a ton of learning and play activities. Art, learning, and play are more fun with a fine motor manipulative like this simple household item.

Literacy Pre-Reading Activity

Big Sister used a permanent marker to write uppercase letters on the clothes pins. We wanted to use upper case letters so that Little Guy (age 5) would be able to identify the letters. He is just starting to identify lower case letters, but I wanted to ensure confidence and success in this part of the activity so he would try something a litter harder for him: sounding out letters in pre-reading skills.

We worked together to sort out the letters on the clothes pins. We did a few different activities with the clothes pins once we had all of the letters.

First, we went on a scavenger hunt around the yard, pinning our clothes pins to objects in nature with the corresponding letter. It was a fun pre-reading task to sound out things that we saw. Pinching the pins onto items was a fun fine motor task for both kids. We pinned R to "roots".

S is for "sticks".
We did a few quizzes for Little Guy. Big Sister and I thought of an item and said I know something that starts with the letter "S". He had to think and look to find something that started with "s" as he sounded out sssss. This is such a great pre-reading activity for pre-readers.

B is for bark.

A is for arborvitae. Time for a science lesson!
How many ABC items can you think of in the great outdoors? We put together a list of ABC nature items that you can find in our NEW newsletter. It's a completely free way to be sure you see all of our posts. Each Wednesday, you'll receive an email of our latest blog posts along with other fun stuff. Sign up for the newsletter to get the full list of ABCs of Nature items. But don't worry, we'll be sharing the list with you at some point in the future. Watch this space!

Looking for more Outdoor play ideas for this Fall? Check out the fun from the other All Things Kids bloggers:

All Done Monkey: Explorer Unit
Little Bins for Little Hands: Preschool Physics Apple Gravity Experiment Science Play Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails: DIY Apple Scented Bubbles-Fall Outside Play

You can link up your Fall or outdoor fun ideas below.

Visit the All Things Kids pin board for more inspiration:

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Outdoor Pre-Reading Activity for New Readers

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We're back to join the All Things Kids bloggers with this month's series. We're talking about Fall and Outdoor fun with the kids. We are a family that plays outside every.single. day. Friends at church have said to us, "Wow you guys are tan, you must spend a lot of time outside"...