#outdoor education

[jadafitch]

Cover sketch for I Love Birds, Nature Smarts Activity Book number 5! Not out until April 15th, but available for preorder now through Amazon and other retailers. PREORDER

[strawlessandbraless]

Shout out to the National Park Service for doing the work 🌲 🏔️ 🦅🌵🦌🍄🍂🌳🏕️

And a reminder to hug your local park ranger, but ask first, not all of them like it

[outdoorsy-bitch]

Op has a good point, but also remember that this is partially by design. In conservation messaging, we push what the public will care about or relate to. Everyone knows what a bee is, we can use the goods domestic honeybees make to create a personal reference point. All new knowledge needs something to stick to in people's brains, so bees and monarchs are the metaphorical glue that we can add stuff onto.

Additionally, even if people don't care about less 'cute' species, we can use the species they do care about to help all insects. When monarchs started dying, the public went "Oh no, our pretty butterflies! How can we save them!?" Naturalists seen this as the opportunity it was, and pushed milkweed gardens, alongside other flowering plants. While it's true that milkweed is incredibly important for monarchs, it's also a reliable flowering plant that's native to many areas and comes back every year. A lot of times, milkweed is a plant it once and you're never able to get rid of it type of deal. This established reliable food sources for not only the butterflies, but also wasps, birds, moths, etc.

So I totally see where OP is coming from, it can be extremely frustrating when all you hear about are bees. But keep in mind that bees are the glue that we can add other knowledge to, and every bit of conservation helps the ecosystem as a whole!

"#Save the Birds!"

Imagine if there was a popular movement to "save the birds" but the only birds people knew about were chickens and maybe geese. So everyone proposes doing things like raising chickens in your backyard to save the birds.

There IS a strange disease affecting chickens that is a major threat to the poultry industry. It's just that at the same time there are devastating declines in other birds that no one is paying attention to.

Now imagine that you are one of the few people who knows that other birds exist. You have nothing against chickens. It's just that there are so many wild birds that need our help too. Everyone you meet is surprised when you inform them about these other birds.

All this time, the other birds can be seen right outside their windows. It's just that few people take the time to stop and notice them.

This is what "Save the bees" is like.

[kids-worldfun]

4 Fun Activities to Connect Kids With Nature

Children learn most effectively when given the freedom to explore, create, manipulate, and get hands-on. These concepts are uncomplicated, enjoyable, and require little preparation, and your little ones will thoroughly enjoy discovering the world around them. Easily incorporate these outdoor tasks into homeschool curricula or engage in structured outdoor activities with your children. Immerse…

[jasminedlowe]

Here's What I Get Out of Backpacking

There is something about having to carry all that you’re going to need to live in the wilderness for days on your back that makes you question your entire life. Hiking heals, but backpacking takes it up a notch as you discover what is most important.

There is something about having to carry all that you’re going to need to live in the wilderness for days on your back that makes you question your entire life. You begin to whittle down what you’re going to need to just the essentials as you pack. You find out what is important to you and in life in general as you carry the heavy weight of all your packing choices on the trail. You realize that…

[k12academics]

Arthur Morgan School was founded by Elizabeth and Ernest Morgan in 1962 to provide a learning environment tailored for children in their early teenage years. Ernest Morgan was the elder son of Arthur Morgan. Arthur and his wife Lucy had cherished the idea of starting a small school in a rural setting that fostered initiative, responsibility, and imagination.

Many educators influenced Elizabeth Morgan in the formation of their philosophy of education, including Johann Pestalozzi, N.S.F. Grundtvig, Mahatma Gandhi, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Arthur Morgan. The philosophy and methods of these great educators emphasize the development of the whole person through a combination of study, work, and social interaction in a community. As leaders in progressive education they each valued practical education as an extremely important experience in order for men and women to be enlightened. In addition, they stress inner motivation and the responsibility of the individual as a part of the whole. To these ideas, Elizabeth her own Quaker values of simple living, consensus decision-making, and non-violent problem solving.

Both Elizabeth and Ernest Morgan were very active in many causes. Elizabeth collected workers’ songs from all over the world and used them to educate people about suppression and exploitation. She had been active in the struggle against the Ku Klux Klan persecutions and racist assaults in Georgia. She arranged protest marches and helped the strikers in their attempt at getting better pay and fair treatment. In most cases, she used music and song as a means to arouse people’s solidarity and to inform them of both traditions and visions. Early in their marriage both Elizabeth and Ernest had joined the Society of Friends, or Quakers. They felt that the Quaker way of silent worship, work for social justice, resistance to the military and violence, and equality for all people, especially women, were very consistent with their views. Today, AMS incorporates many Quaker traditions into its daily life.

Their youngest son Lee attended Camp Celo in Celo Community, North Carolina. In 1958, when the camp was about to be laid down by its owners, Elizabeth and Ernest decided to join another family, the Barrus’s, to continue the camp. It was at this time that Elizabeth decided to take the first steps to establish a school. The school would be able to become part of the Celo Health Education Corporation, the non-profit corporation that also governed the Celo Health Center. (In the 1990s, the school became its own financial entity with a volunteer Board and non-profit status.) Members of Celo Community gave her lots of encouragement and they were willing to provide land for a negligible cost.

From 1958 until the school opened in 1962 family work camps were held in the summer to improve the few buildings that were on the property. A long, low barn for chickens, basement room, and brooder house were turned into a kitchen, dining room, classrooms, workshop, and laundry. This experience revealed to Elizabeth and Ernest Morgan the enthusiasm junior high students had for doing real work.

[future-bog-teacher]

I delivered my first lesson plan in front of one of my classes today! They are all a few years ahead of me so it was pretty nerve wracking, but I think it went really well! It was a trauma informed/healing centric lesson about connectivity and environmental degradation geared towards K-2nd.

I wanted to focus on the feeling of helplessness a lot of young learners get from learning about the environment, and teach them it's okay to feel those big feelings, and even though there are bigger systems that hurt the Earth working together and building your community around helping the earth can still make a difference. I really wanted to emphasize that students can still help the earth without pollution coming through as an individual/carbon footprint issue. I have so many thoughts about where else I can go with the plans I have.

[themontessoriacademyofarlington]

Early Childhood - Caring for Animals

This student is intently watching on of our chickens eating the feed she spread on the ground. Having animals to care for helps teach responsibility, compassion, empathy, and an understanding and respect for other living things. Animals teach children to value life other than their own, in addition to teaching them about the natural growth and life cycles of many different species which they can observe on a daily basis. Another benefit is the stress reduction that occurs as a result of observing and interacting with the animals, from which both the children and the animals can benefit.

[emleelion]

The yearly return!

As per usual I have returned from my 6 months work abroad and will be posting all the stuff I made and never got a chance to post. Expect more posts for at least a month or so before I'm off travelling again.

[ddienw]

....we have an old outdoor training called Take It Outside and I just realized this means in like 50 years someone could conceivably call a similar training Go Touch Grass.

[ahedgehogonthesea]

I finally made a uquiz! Tell me what cool ass woodland organism you are. I'm a professional and the result is based on science and definitely not just vibes

[jadafitch]

Went out to the pond to take this photo, and heard the first spring peepers of the year. Yay! It's officially spring in Downeast, Maine.

This illustration is one over 100 I did for the forth Nature Smarts activity book from Mass Audubon and Storey Publishing. Nature Smarts Workbook: All About Water, Ages 4-6 is available for preorder now, and out May 21st. You can find it through Amazon, Mass Audubon, and other book sellers.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

The most salient point to me in all this is that he used an unnamed ID app to try to figure out what mushrooms he found because he thought "Man those look good." The app misidentified the mushrooms as edible puffballs, but in reality they were destroying angels (Amanita ocreata). One is enough to kill an adult, and this person ate four of them. He's very, very lucky to be alive.

This is far from the first time someone put their entire faith in a single app to tell them what mushroom they were looking at, and then they paid the price with their health. You're going to hear me say this again and again: never, ever, ever use an app as your only tool for identifying anything, especially if you're planning to eat it. An app can be useful in conjunction with other tools like books, websites, online foraging groups, etc. But apps are frequently wrong, and are not the easy answer many people seem to want them to be.

(Rant about foraging below the cut.)

This right here is why I spend a decent amount of time in my foraging classes trying to scare the hell out of my students. I want them to understand the risks, not just as a brief aside, but as anecdotes I've collected from the news over the years like this one. I have had more than one person say afterward "Wow, I had a really romanticized view of foraging, and now I'm going to be more careful." That's a clue to me that I've done my job.

It's why my classes are SO focused on identification skills and tools to make you a more informed and careful forager. I am not going to just spend a bunch of time showing you slides of all sorts of edible species, with a little bit of information on how to identify and collect them tucked in before or after. Yes, we do look at some beginner-friendly species near the end of the class, but if all you want to get out of a foraging class is names and pictures of edible plants or fungi, that's what field guides are for. I spend the bulk of the time doing my absolute best to make sure people are PREPARED to go out and use their observational and critical thinking skills when assessing a new-to-them species, to include making use of many different types of resource, not just a single app.

I have literally had people complain that we spent too much time on "boring" stuff, and not enough on the edible species themselves---aaaaaand I don't care. My goal is to try as hard as I can to make sure incidents like the article above don't happen in the first place, which is going to take more than a couple of hours of looking at pretty pictures of mushrooms. Sure, sometimes all you get is a night of bad indigestion, but if you get one of the really nasty species full of amatoxins, you can die. Or end up with permanent liver and/or kidney damage. Or need an organ transplant.

And yes, as I said, you will get information on some species that I think are relatively beginner-friendly because they're distinctive AND they don't have any really serious poisonous lookalikes. But puffballs aren't on that list, and this article is a perfect example of why.

[k12academics]

It is becoming more and more important in a world that is destructive and degenerating that there should be a place, an oasis, where one can learn a way of living that is whole, sane, and intelligent. Education in the modern world has been concerned with the cultivation not of intelligence, but of intellect, of memory and its skills. In this process little occurs beyond passing information from the teacher to the taught, the leader to the follower, bringing about a superficial and mechanical way of life. In this there is little human relationship.

Surely a school is a place where one learns about the totality, the wholeness of life. Academic excellence is absolutely necessary, but a school includes much more than that. It is a place where both the teacher and the taught explore not only the outer world, the world of knowledge, but also their own thinking, their behavior. From this they begin to discover their own conditioning and how it distorts their thinking. This conditioning is the self to which such tremendous and cruel importance is given. Freedom from conditioning and its misery begins with this awareness. It is only in such freedom that true learning can take place. In this school it is the responsibility of the teacher to sustain with the student a careful exploration into the implications of conditioning and thus end it.

A school is a place where one learns the importance of knowledge and its limitations. It is a place where one learns to observe the world not from any particular point of view or conclusion. One learns to look at the whole of man’s endeavor, his search for beauty, his search for truth and for a way of living without conflict. Conflict is the very essence of violence. So far education has not been concerned with this, but in this school our intent is to understand actuality and its action without any preconceived ideals, theories, or belief, which bring about a contradictory attitude toward existence.

The school is concerned with freedom and order. Freedom is not the expression of one’s own desire, choice, or self-interest. That inevitably leads to disorder. Freedom of choice is not freedom, though it may appear so; nor is order, conformity, or imitation. Order can only come with the insight that to choose is itself the denial of freedom.

In school one learns the importance of relationship which is not based on attachment and possession. It is here one can learn about the movement of thought, love, and death, for all this is our life. From the ancient of times, man has sought something beyond the materialistic world, something immeasurable, something sacred. It is the intent of this school to inquire into this possibility.

This whole movement of inquiry into knowledge, into oneself, into the possibility of something beyond knowledge, brings about naturally a psychological revolution, and from this comes inevitably a totally different order in human relationship, which is society. The intelligent understanding of all this can bring about a profound change in the consciousness of mankind.