By W. George Scarlett When there are pond problems, such as when fish are dying, it often takes systems thinking and high-level scientific investigation to… Read More »When Pond Problems Call for Systems Thinking
By W. George Scarlett Image ©dimedrol68 / Adobe Stock As featured elsewhere on TES (see Collecting for Connecting to the Natural World), late childhood can… Read More »Sorting Out Pond Stuff
Review by Hailey Swett, book by Kate Messner with art by Christopher Silas Neal | 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.
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.
By W. George Scarlett | Waterbug, waterbug, always gliding / Never sinking, always sliding…
By Layla Sastry | The following is an exercise that can be used with younger and older children to help them connect to and know life in and around ponds.
By W. George Scarlett | To know nature can be through touching, smelling, seeing – in short, through sensing.
By Zhou Jiang and Ting Zhang | By Children in urban kindergartens lack opportunities to get close to nature. But with help from teachers, getting close to nature can still happen – as the following story illustrates. The story is about a kindergarten in the West Lake District, Hangzhou City, where poop in the sandpit inspired a class of 4–5-year-old children to explore their relationship with a cat.
By W. George Scarlett | I have sometimes wondered how came the stars, not to mention the moon and Mars. Are they someone’s leftover Christmas tree snow? Or perhaps they are mothballs – I really don’t know.
By Amy and Dan Warren | Our son, Lio, hops in the car at the end of a cold and damp school day. Rosy-cheeked and smeared with earth and ash from fort-building and fire-making, he reaches down to take off his boots and empty them of leaves, water, and mud. His pockets carry the day’s found treasures: Quartz rocks, cool sticks that double as swords, acorns with their cupule caps carefully removed. He tells us about playing in the stream, falling in, and then warming up by the fire. The cold and wet, and the restorative warmth of fire, are intimate experiences for Lio, part of his personal history. Consequences—the interplay of these experiences—are naturally rooted in the context, and so they are predictable and seemingly just. So too is his personal efficacy, as he navigates the context: The warmth of the fire he helped to make, and his regained comfort, signal his effectiveness. He is but a part of a whole system called Nature.
