Bringing Nature Back Into the Classroom and Becoming a Citizen Naturalist
As teachers, we are overwhelmed by the growing demands of standardized testing and curriculum expansion. Yet, if we stop for a moment and look into the eyes of our students, it becomes pretty clear what is really important; helping each other find the time to breathe and learn to enjoy life. There is no better way to do this than by fostering a connection with the natural world by exposing children (and ourselves) to a local wild space and become familiar with its occupants, stories, and rhythms.
We are developing elementary classroom materials specially related to chaparral communities and will be releasing them soon. If you would like to receive updates regarding this effort, please join the Institute. You can also check out our Chaparral Kids page. We encourage you to share your thoughts and ideas as well via EMAIL.
In the mean time you can obtain from us now an excellent DVD that is a great way to introduce your students to the chaparral. It is suitable for all ages. View a film clip on our Membership Page.
San Diego Wildfires Education Project
The primary purpose of this environmental education initiative is to educate and motivate individuals most directly affected by the fires in terms of understanding and monitoring the multi-faceted environmental recovery process, with special emphasis on source and run-off pollution, watershed and habitat restoration, and species recovery.
This aspect of the project targets 16,000 children in grades K-8 in severe fire-damaged regions in San Diego County, and their teachers, about 950. This includes seven rural school districts that boardered or were engulfed in the burn area. Using both traditional curricula and in-school interactive programming for grades K-5, and workbook in comic book format for middle school children (grades 6-8), students and teachers will be assisted in understanding post-burn environmental impacts and provided opportunities for direct involvement in the recovery process.
A secondary purpose of this environmental education initiative is to develop grade-appropriate post-fire curricula that will educate and engage students in grades K-8 throughout San Diego County about the fires in terms of immediate, intermediate, and long-term environmental impacts.
Students identify biotic and abiotic relationships within the riparian, oak woodland, chaparral, intertidal, benthic and pelagic ecosystems. Nights are spent at the rustic Lazy W Ranch in the Cleveland National Forest and include a night hike and campfire. A trip to the Ocean Institute includes investigating food webs, water quality, life cycles, tide pools and an optional trip on our research vessel.
Spend a day at the Lazy W Ranch discovering the riparian, oak woodland and chaparral ecosystems! Activities include identifying the biological and physical factors that define each environment, stream collecting, learning about food webs, and studying plant and animal adaptations.
Ocean Institute, 24200 Dana Point Harbor Dr., Dana Point, CA 92629
Phone: (949) 496-2274
In Memory of Adeline Black, a True Chaparralian
For Indiana Adeline, as some friends called her, getting one step closer to nature meant going wherever her adventurous spirit led her.
A mainstay of the San Diego Natural History Museum Canyoneers, Adeline Black shared her experience, her enthusiasm and her encyclopedic knowledge in leading hikes and training volunteers.
She was the heart and soul of the Canyoneers, and of the Tecolote Canyon Nature Center, too, said Bill Howell, who trains Canyoneers to lead hikes and nature walks.
When she ventured to foreign soil, equipped with enough research to equal her curiosity, Mrs. Black took on the irrepressible persona of a female Indiana Jones of movie fame.
She always had to go one more place, one step higher, and to know one more thing, said her companion, Bill Barbour.
On Jan. 5, the final day of a three-week vacation in Mexico ' s Yucatan peninsula, Mrs. Black decided to walk up a steep 91-stair pyramid, Castillo de Kukalcan, in Chichen Itza. She was about two-thirds up when she slipped and fell about 60 feet to the ground.
Four hours later, she was pronounced dead at Regional de Valladolid Hospital. She was 80.
When we celebrated Adeline ' s 80th birthday (in September), we expected her to be around another 20 years, Howell said. She was in excellent health.
Her intellectual vigor seemed to match her physical endurance. Age was just a number to her, Barbour said.
She had no formal training in natural history, but she just soaked it up, Howell said. She had huge files on every trail Canyoneers had ever been on or ever will be on.
Whenever anybody had a question, Ask Adeline was the familiar refrain. It was like a mantra, Howell said.
A Canyoneer since 1981, Mrs. Black put together the group ' s annual brochure and researched and collected data on regional ecology, turning each exploration into a natural history lesson.
She kept such voluminous records on natural history topics that the library in her Clairemont home was taxed to capacity. She started giving stuff away, including a huge binder of butterflies that she gave me, Howell said.
In recognition of the books she recently donated to the Tecolote nature center, board members voted in January to name the center ' s library in Mrs. Black ' s honor.
Volunteering is its own reward, Mrs. Black told her friends at the Natural History Museum. It ' s giving back to your community in a way that is self-enriching and fun. It ' s the best thing you can do for yourself.
One of her trademarks was learning the names of plants by leading hikers and Canyoneer trainees in song.
While she admitted that the more consonants in the Latin name, the better the song, Adeline knew that singing is one of the best ways to memorize names of flora and fauna, said Delle Willett, director of marketing for the Natural History Museum.
In addition to her role as a Canyoneer, Mrs. Black volunteered at Quail Botanical Gardens, at Tecolote Canyon Nature Center and for the Monarch Program (an educational and research project emphasizing the monarch butterfly).
Four years ago, she received the first Topper Thomas Award for her contributions to the Canyoneer program. In 2004, the philanthropic Friends of Balboa Park gave her its Inspiration Award.
Adeline Lorraine Schiller Black was born Sept. 19, 1925, in Great Bend, N.D.
Growing up on a farm, she rode horses, drove tractors, plowed fields and raised chickens.
At North Dakota State College of Science near Wahpeton, she excelled academically.
While working in Japan as a military post office clerk, she met her future husband, John Lucas Black, whom she married in 1949. After settling with her husband in San Diego, Mrs. Black worked as a secretary for the county engineering department. She later became a supervisor for the county housing authority.
In 1980, her son, Tony, was killed in an auto accident involving a drunken driver. Two years later, her husband died.
One way of dealing with her grief was to immerse herself into nature studies and volunteering, Barbour said.
Barbour, who had known Mrs. Black and her husband since the 1960s, lost his spouse in 1993. The following year, he and Mrs. Black became traveling companions. The relationship grew well beyond that, Barbour said.
With Barbour, she traveled to such destinations as Thailand, China, Spain and Turkey, where she explored an underground city and a hilltop tomb.
Even before her latest adventure, Mrs. Black had planned trips to American and Canadian national parks, the Panama Canal and possibly Costa Rica, Barbour said.
Survivors include two sisters, Melba Muth of Sun City, Ariz., and Alvina Ille of Monroe, Utah.
A memorial service is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the San Diego Natural History Museum. A memorial hike in honor of Mrs. Black is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. June 10 at the Tecolote Canyon Nature Center.
Donations are suggested to the San Diego Natural History Museum ' s Education Department or to Tecolote Canyon Nature Center.
Encouraging today's youngsters to bond with Mother Earth
By Richard Louv May 28, 2005 – San Diego Union Tribune
If, when we were young, we tramped through San Diego's chaparral canyons, or raised pigeons on a rooftop in Queens, or fished for Ozark bluegills, or felt the swell of a wave that traveled a thousand miles before lifting our boat, then we were bound to the natural world and remain so today.
Nature still informs our years – lifts us, carries us.
As a boy, I spent hours exploring the woods and farmland at the suburban edge of Kansas City. Within the windbreaks were trees that we could shinny, the smaller branches like the rungs of a ladder.
We climbed far above the fields and, from that vantage, looked out upon the old blue ridges of Missouri, and the roofs of new houses in the ever-encroaching suburbs.
Often, I climbed alone, imagining myself as Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves. If I climbed high enough, the branches thinned to the point where, when the wind came, the world would tip down and up and around and up and to the side and up. It was frightening and wonderful to surrender to the wind's power.
Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idle days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
Members of my generation grew into adulthood taking nature's childhood gifts for granted; we assumed (when we thought of it at all) that generations to come also would receive these blessings. But now we know that something has changed.
Over the past 15 years, I have interviewed families across the country about the changes in their lives, including their relationship with nature. With few exceptions, even in rural areas, parents say the same thing: Most children aren't playing outside anymore, not in the woods or the fields or the canyons. Today, kids are well aware of the global threats to the environment, but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature on a day-to-day basis, is fading.
A fifth-grader in a San Diego classroom put it succinctly: "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."
I believe our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That unintended message is delivered by schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities – effectively banning much of the kind of play that we enjoyed as children. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom, while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Well-meaning public-school systems, media and parents are scaring children straight out of the woods and fields.
Many parents are aware of the change, and they sense its importance. When asked, they cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including disappearing access to natural areas, competition from television and computers, dangerous traffic, more homework and other time pressures. Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger, as round-the-clock news coverage conditions them to believe in an epidemic of child-snatchings, despite evidence that the number has been falling for years.
As a result, children's worlds, limitless in cyberspace, areshrinking in reality. A 1991 study of three generations of 9-year-olds foundthat between 1970 and 1990, the radius around the home where children wereallowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in1970. This year, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8 to 18 Year Olds,"conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, revealed that kids' averageweekly electronic media exposure is almost 60 hours, more time than most ofparents spend on full-time jobs. And the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives ofFamilies reports that during the week, parents and children are in constantmotion, racing between school, games, shopping, work – and American kidsspend virtually no time in their own yards. Such lives leave little time forunstructured activities in nature.
As the nature deficit grows, new studies demonstrate just how important direct contact with the outdoors is to healthy human development. Some of the most intriguing research has been inspired by Harvard University scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson's "biophilia" hypothesis. Wilson defines biophilia as "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life." He and his colleagues argue that humans have an innate affinity for the natural world, probably a biologically based need integral to our development as individuals.
In short, we need experience in nature more than we know.
Most of the new evidence that connects nature to well-being and restoration has focused on adults but, during the past decade, scientists have begun to study the impact of nearby nature on child development. Environmental psychologists reported in 2003 that nature in or around the home, or simply a room with a view of a natural landscape, helped protect the psychological well-being of the children.
Researchers have found that children with disabilities gain enhanced body image and positive behavior changes through direct interaction with nature. Studies of outdoor-education programs geared toward troubled youth – especially those diagnosed with mental-health problems – show a clear therapeutic value. Some of the most intriguing studies are being done by the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, where researchers have discovered that children as young as 5 showed a significant reduction in the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder when they engaged with nature. Could nature therapy be a new option for ADD treatment?
Meanwhile, the California-based State Education and Environmental Roundtable, a national effort to study environment-based education, found that schools that use outdoor classrooms, among other techniques, produce student gains in social studies, science, language arts and math; improved standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and enhanced skills in problem-solving, critical thinking and decision-making. In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests that time in natural surroundings also stimulates children's creativity.
People who care about children and the future of the environment need to know about such research, but for the most part, they do not. Today, we see dramatic increases in childhood obesity, attention difficulties and depression. When these issues are discussed at the conference table or the kitchen table, direct childhood experience in nature is seldom mentioned. Yet, the growing nature deficit experienced by today's children, and potentially for generations to come, may be the most important common denominator.
I am not suggesting that we bring back the free-range childhood of the 1950s. Those days are over. But, with a deeper understanding of the importance of nature play to healthy child development, and to their sense of connection to the world, we can create safe zones for nature exploration. We can preserve the open space in our cities, and even design and build new kinds of communities, using the principles of green urbanism. We can weave nature experiences into our classrooms, and nature therapy into our health-care system.
And we can challenge environmental organizations to take this issue seriously. For if the disconnection between children and nature continues, who will become the future stewards of the earth – and who will swing on birches?
