Articles

By W. George Scarlett, Image via Internet Archive Book Images Oysters lying side by side,Keeping back the ocean’s tide.Slurping food from water’s yuckThen spitting back where yuck gets stuck.Cleaning up the estuarySo fish might live and children swimAs shores keep their shorelines trim,And wonder comes to tarry.

By W. George Scarlett, Illustration by Angelina Lewis Salt marsh periwinkle safe when tide is out.But tide’s now rolling in with blue crabs all about.Up goes periwinkle climbing smooth cordgrass.Now those hungry blue crabs will have to swim on past.

By Leah Harrigan, image via Carolina Wildscapes (Adobe Stock) Children can see and feel the magic of ecosystems by creating a “Periwinkle Snail Habitat” using common household materials. This hands-on project will help them understand the role of snails in our environment while having some fun along the way. Materials Large glass or plastic container…

By Fangfang Xiao, translated by Qin Shu One morning, after a rain, teachers Yue and Qi found a small mollusk, without a shell, climbing on the osmanthus tree. They quickly drew children around and sparked a discussion. The next day, Zhou brought a book called Life Story in which everyone found the answer to the…

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 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…

By W. George Scarlett Image ©dimedrol68 / Adobe Stock As featured elsewhere on TES (see Collecting for Connecting to the Natural World), 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

By John Hornstein | My mother was happiest when foraging for mushrooms. Being an immigrant from Germany, she had difficulty adjusting to life in rural Maine. Foraging became a way for her to stay connected to her childhood. It also connected her to something more primal, the natural world. As a child tagging along on…

By W. George Scarlett | In E.B. White’s classic children’s book, Charlotte’s Webb, Charlotte, the spider, becomes the kind and smart friend of Wilbur, the pig. Charlotte saves Wilbur from the usual destiny of farm pigs by weaving into her web words praising Wilbur and making him famous among the surrounding humans.  But if that were all there…

By Mitchel Resnick | In recent years, a growing number of educators and psychologists have expressed concern that computers are stifling children’s learning and creativity, engaging children in mindless interaction and passive consumption. They have a point: today, many computers are used in that way. But that needn’t be the case.

By Theo Klimstra | One of the striking differences between the Netherlands and most countries is the vast number of bikes that you’ll see everywhere. In the Netherlands, everybody rides bikes, partly because they are cheap to buy and cheap to maintain for commuting (no gas required) and partly because Dutch employers team up with…

By Jane Hirschi | Years ago, I spent an afternoon with a group of eighth-grade boys digging up potatoes. They were amazed to find potatoes growing underground and surprised by their almost peppery flavor when we cooked and ate them. More recently, I witnessed a third grader who often struggled when asked to speak…

By Robin Huntley and David Sobel | Start a conversation about using the natural environment, or taking learning outside, or studying the bobolinks in the meadow, and ticks start crawling through the recesses of school administrators’ and parents’ minds. Ticks and their associated diseases are perceived as a scourge across the northeastern United States, and…

By Jack Ridge | This is a story about collecting. Not the kind of collecting that clutters our basements and garages because we can’t let go, but the kind of collecting that stimulates life-long curiosity for the natural world. This story is about the natural objects we collect, the ones we look upon with curiosity…

By Doug Tallamy | If you live with at least some green around you, chances are you have never thought of space just outside and next to where you live as a wildlife preserve that represents the last opportunity we have for sustaining plants and animals that were once common throughout the U.S.. But that…

By James Cassell | Perhaps the most impressive architects of the natural world, beavers are famous for their iconic buck teeth. Using their teeth, these furry engineers build dams to flood and sculpt their environment. In doing so, they not only provide protection and lodging for themselves, they also form stagnant ponds that provide…

By Iris Ponte | I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is check the outdoor temperature. As a preschool educator, I used to think 30 degrees was cold. Not anymore. Our school has opened in 17 degrees, multiple times. We have learned to layer, eat warm foods in thermoses, and…

By Ashley Lin | If you don’t know the name of the tree outside your house or apartment (or don’t know if there is a tree outside your window), you’re not alone. Most people don’t think about finding nature when they look out their window at home or at their workplace, so they don’t see…

By Janot Mendler de Suarez and Pablo Suarez | What does humor have to do with serious stuff like climate change and environmental justice? Short answer: everything. Most people associate ‘humor’ with laughter, fun, or jokes, but when we asked legendary cartoonist Bob Mankoff what he thinks of when thinking about humor, he looked us…

By Osita Achufusi | 415,000. That’s how many African elephants are left in the wild as of 2018, according to the World Wildlife Foundation. While this may seem like a sufficient amount, it’s not. Consider that an estimated 10 million of these gentle giants roamed Africa just a mere 90 years ago and that there…

By Maria Ojala | Many young people today worry about climate change and what is happening to our planet. And those who worry cope in very different ways. Some ways lead away from positive actions and earth stewardship, while other ways forge a foundation for positive actions and earth stewardship. So how do we discover…

By W. George Scarlett |
There’s a certain irony in the fact that where we find the most diversity in life forms, in nature, we find the least diversity in human life forms – at least in the U.S.. In the U.S., go to national parks or any place where wildness is featured, and…

By Lisa Sideris | The connection between wonder and children and childlike states is one we often take for granted. Yet wonder is also the province of scientists whose expert knowledge far exceeds that of the average layperson.

By Ashley Lin | What can we do when the world is turned upside-down? How do we help young people grapple with the uncertainty, stress, and anxiety that is a constant in life but heightened during a pandemic? How can we come out triumphant, even a bit stronger?

By Tina Grotzer | I grew up in a rural environment with woods and streams all around me. Others would say that we were poor, but I never felt impoverished. I climbed trees, explored the pond, got stuck in the mud, and jumped onto the gnarled, moss-covered roots in the middle of the creek to…

By W. George Scarlett | Sometimes, the need is to act in a single-minded, straightforward way, a way designed to meet a crisis head-on and without delay, a way that says “Stop talking about ‘ought’ and start acting on ‘must’ “. But to do so means setting aside characteristic adult ways of being cautious and…

By George Newman | Now that nature has entered the conversation (with storms, rising seas, wildfires, etc.), it’s obvious the times call for action to redress harms done to the natural world and to nature’s systems for sustaining life, our lives included.

By Ashley Lin | According to the International Organization for Migration, by the year 2050, up to a billion people may become climate change refugees. This is most alarming in the Pacific Island nations, where rising sea levels, warming oceans, and unsustainable fishing practices are already putting citizens in jeopardy.

Sarah Wagner | Imagine the best possible early childhood program – where children spend the day in a space beautifully organized to invite a variety of forms of children’s play, where the children remain engaged by a rich array of materials to play with, build with, and learn with, and where teachers engage the children…

By Melissa Wishner | Picture a stone-grey river. The river is wide—too wide to swim across. Under its glassy surface lives a thriving community of eels, snapping turtles, fish, crabs, and other plant and animal life. You wouldn’t think a river like this would be easy to ignore.

By Bian Xia | After four visits to China, Howard Gardner wrote in To Open Minds, a seminal text comparing education in China and the United States: We might contrast the Western, more “revolutionary” view with a more “evolutionary” view espoused by the Chinese.

By W. George Scarlett | At four, the future primatologist Jane Goodall wondered how eggs come out of a hen—so she crawled into her family’s little henhouse to find out. After a while, a hen followed her in and gave her the answer. The little girl was mesmerized.

By Liz Georgakopoulos | The teen internship program at the New England Aquarium dates back to 1992 when funding first became available for summer jobs for teenagers in Boston. After a slow start of two interns in 1992 and an increase to 10 interns in 1996, the popularity and funding fell into place partially…