Fred First, naturalist and long time “Imaginary Internet Friend” is interested in a homeschooling related project around getting kids more in tune with the natural world.
Parents and grandparents today realize the widening distance between their children-charges and the world of nature that was so formative in their own growing-up years.
I’m interested in help from the homeschooling population to help me identify how this issue has already been addressed in existing resources so I can focus my future efforts on what remains to be done with regard to the “nature gap”.
I’d like to use my writing and photography and spoken word experience to reach homeschooled children, who, in my experience, are easier to reach perhaps than public school-conditioned children.
Go check out his summary of what he wants to do and leave any ideas / input you have in the comments here, and I’ll make sure he sees them.
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The Charlotte Mason crowd would seem an obvious place to start?
Here’s the Anne Zeise page of CM resources (look for the outside and nature mentions, not the copywork stuff)
Also Pam Sorooshian was big into Girl Scouts, camped with the kids and the oldest wound up with a recreation major and became an honest-to FSM park ranger!
Laura Derrick’s family did orienteering.
Thanks, yes, this is just the kind of direction I think will lead me to get a feel for “what’s out there”, much appreciated, and thanks again, Chris.
Hi Fred, cool project.
I just thought that my 14-year-old son is the least outdoorsy-nature type you’ve ever seen and a real homebody-art-book-computer geek, but he takes long solitary walks around the neighborhood and he LOVED Ken Burns’ National Parks series, really got into John Muir and Stephen Mather, Gifford Pinchot (and Teddy Roosevelt of course.) So for him the history of the natural world seems the hook, the human story IOW, not the nature itself. If that helps.
Oh — just remembered a great homeschool blog mom of the organic movement too. Her dad, the granddad, is a boda fide sea captain and her early blogging was gorgeous nature photos, also highlighted the HMS Beagle project. Then there was a divorce I think, and she was in Nova Scotia with the kids in the most apple-cheeked, thatch-roofed setting imaginable. (Can’t find that blog anymore.) Now she has another blog full of outdoor photography from nothern Yorkshire, about organic gardening and living on their “allotment” –
JJ “…and became an honest-to FSM park ranger!”
My mind will only process that one way right now. LOL. I didn’t know there was a park dedicated to His Noodliness. I trust that it’s better than the creation museum, and hey, it’s outside to boot.
Well, if there’s not, there ought to be! (But would it be in Italy instead of North America, or some urban Little Italy at least, where the pasta and meatballs are like manna, sufficient to every day?)
I’ve been thinking on and off about the more serious aspect of this question and I’m not coming up with much.
The homeschooling kids I know do get out and spend time with their own thoughts in nature. I think that may be at the root of them being more reachable.
I’m sure this is in part a function of the people around me. Part of it is having the time to do so, even in an urban setting. We live in the center of a city, yet have herons, kingishers and hawks in our yard from time to time. I bet most of my neighbors haven’t seen them or the coyote that ghosts around the area either. We’re out at odd times and have more options to just stop and watch when we notice something. If I’m late to a co-op meeting because there was a hawk in the tree that touches the house, my friends response would be “Wow, cool!” I don’t think the schools response would be the same. Because the response is positive when these sorts of events happen, everyone LOOKS more and the whole thing snowballs.
The only thing I can see myself really considering would be an art/nature journal type book with open ended starters for my kiddo who gets overwhelmed in narrowing down starting points. That one likes the idea of doing something like a journal, but looks at the blank page and freezes up. I wouldn’t mind taking me out of the creative process.