Naturalist’s Notebook to Get Students Learning Outside
By Karl Horeis NBCT
2021 National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow
With so many students stuck learning from screens due to the pandemic, I am excited to get mine back outside into nature. With that in mind I created and I want to share this Naturalist’s Notebook full of outdoor observations and activities. I hope you and your students can use it to get back into nature this spring.
Using the great outdoors as a classroom, this notebook provides 20 activities that will help your students develop their Explorer Mindset, an idea pushed by National Geographic Education. With support from National Geographic, I hope this project will increase your students’ powers of observation, help them practice patience and soothe students burned out from too much screen time.
One of the first activities is observing with four senses in a sit spot. Students choose their own special spot surrounded by trees, flowers, maybe a creek — whatever you have available. They are prompted to listen, look, smell and feel carefully — increasing awareness and sensitivity to the world around. Do they feel warm sunshine on their skin? Itchy grass on their legs? A cool breeze in their hair? Later they debrief the activity and compare their observations. Did they all hear the same things? For an extension you could have your students compare observations of that spot in different seasons.
After spending years going full-tilt boogie with students, rushing from the copier to conferences to math instruction to observations and on and on, one silver lining to this year has been slowing down. Some of the activities in this collection reflect that, such as flower pressing. I remember doing this when I was a child. But it can take three weeks to dry the flowers! Who has three weeks to spend on a project in normal conditions? Maybe in this crazy year we can intentionally select some flowers, trim them and place them between the pages of an old book. Maybe we can take the time to frame them between plates of plexiglass and hang them on the wall. Maybe those pressed flowers framed on the wall will remind us to slow down and be present with our students for years to come.
A major goal of this project is to help children develop their Explorer Mindset. According to National Geographic, explorers need certain attitudes, skills and knowledge. I have focused on skills with this notebook, including the skill of observation. Many activities encourage students to be careful observers, looking, listening and feeling with careful attention. During your debrief, students can collaborate by communicating about what they have observed. They can pair off and share notes or sit in a circle and take turns sharing with the whole group. Ultimately, your group may decide to DO something about your observations such as cleaning up a park or building bat houses. Students who are isolated at home can have their collaboration and communication time via Google Meet or Zoom.
If you and your students want to collaborate on a larger scale, consider adding to online networks of wildlife sightings. A great place to start is on www.inaturalist.org/ where you can record your observations, share them with fellow naturalists and discuss the findings. They have over 59 million observations collected so far! Another great activity to consider is the Bioblitz. This is a community event where you and your students observe as many different living organisms as possible. It’s an incredible way to expand your students’ ideas about the world around them and begin their work as citizen scientists.
What if your students live in an urban area and there is no nature to observe? Even in cities there are falcons, pigeons and insects to observe. Consider the humble dandelion. Many would call it a weed and spend money trying to poison it. But really, it’s a beautiful flower doing what it’s supposed to: make more flowers. Students will enjoy holding bright yellow dandelion blossoms under each others’ chins on sunny days to see the bright yellow reflected there. Or blow away the parachute-born seeds and watch them fly off to start another plant. This can lead to great conversations about how people have learned from nature. Even students stuck inside can look out windows to watch birds, clouds, weather patterns, squirrels or spring buds growing.
Another often-overlooked interesting subject is the garden snail. Where I live in Denver their old shells can be found along alleyways and behind recycling bins. Have your students pick one up and study its graceful spiral. Compare it to fossil ammonites or coiled up elephant trunks. Even fingerprints or the galaxies around us have a spiral shape. Why? Students who become excited by this question may be ready to research the Fibonacci Sequence — described much earlier in India by Ringala.
Although it might be hard to do with students, there are even nighttime observations in this notebook. Perhaps students can do these with their families at home. It’s amazing to gaze skyward with a pair of binoculars, steady your hands, focus, and see four of Jupiter’s moons lined up diagonally next to our massive planetary neighbor. Most people throughout human history didn’t have the lenses required to do this. They are now readily available. Will we take five minutes to do it? I hope so. These are just the kinds of special opportunities teachers should share with their students.
At a time when so many students are feeling isolated and disconnected, getting back in touch with nature can help them feel grounded and inspired. I hope teachers, parents, grandparents and cool aunts and uncles will make time to take young people outside to observe and learn. If this Naturalist’s Notebook can help you with that in any way, I hope you will feel free to use it. Enjoy!
