Ponds grace our planet with their beauty, serenity, and homes for biodiversity. They make helping children and youth know and care for ponds a noble purpose. To support that noble purpose, TES offers here a special collection of materials and guides for helping children and youth connect to, know, and care for pond life.
To Know is to Wiggle
By W. George Scarlett To know nature can be through touching, smelling, seeing – in short, through sensing. But when creatures in nature aren’t present, then to know can be through representing with symbols. Words and numbers are symbols for knowing (the word frog, the number 2 for how many legs), but almost any medium can provide the means to create symbols for knowing.
“It was a Sunday afternoon, and Tillie Turtle lay around, At the pond with other turtles Who hardly made a sound. Tilly splish-splashed in the water When a leech swam up and got her!”
By W. George Scarlett Bugs sucking the blood of other bugs, hawks grabbing and tearing apart squirrels, coyotes howling after a kill – if ever someone gets sentimental about nature and speaks only of nature’s wonders, that person has missed something central about nature, namely, that nature works on a different ethic than that of most humans.
Book review by Hailey Swett Ponds: what lovely and lively ecosystems! What child doesn’t love exploring a pond, searching for critters big and small? In her picture book Over and Under the Pond, Kate Messner takes young readers on a journey of exploration through a pond, all from the comfort of their homes.
As featured elsewhere on TES (see Collecting for Connecting to the Natural World here ), late childhood can bring a passion for collecting and sorting stuff, including stuff from the natural world. And so, we can put that natural affinity for collecting and sorting (classifying) to work when fostering older children’s connecting, knowing, and caring for ponds and pond life.
When there are pond problems, such as when fish are dying, it often takes systems thinking and high-level scientific investigation to figure out causes and what needs to be done. That’s an unreachable goal for many children. But with proper support, adolescents can become scientists finding cause in the combination of variables observed and measured while studying the systems of a virtual pond. One such support comes from the ecoLearn research lab at Harvard, a support explained in the accompanying film showing how advanced immersive technology can put adolescents right there in and around a (virtual) pond.