Nature Journaling: Kindergarten to High School
“I want you to fall in love with nature,” said John Muir Laws in his introduction to the Wild Wonder Foundation’s Nature Journal Educators Certificate program. “The best way to show love is to pay attention,” he continued. And nature journaling trains your brain to do that.”
This fall, I brought nature journaling into grades K through 5, one or two days per week per class. Although I always arrived as the “art teacher” — pushing my Art Cart of supplies — really, it was all about observation and wonder. The younger grades worked with natural items found around Hoonah, here in the planet’s largest temperate rainforest. In the 4/5 classroom, we grew corn and bean plants. On a frigid December morning, I even took Julian Narvaez's Dual Enrollment Oceanography class field sketching to observe beach formation.
We used a simple structure for designing every page. The students drew, wrote, counted and measured. None of it required a device, and AI had nothing to offer.
According to Laws, nature journaling develops students’ curiosity and encourages the creative thinking of making useful connections between seemingly unrelated things. It provides a safe, supportive structure for taking intellectual and creative risks while developing skills. And it helps with memory — because left to its own devices, our brains make vivid, but highly changeable memories, inaccurate especially for details.
The whole process is built around using Words, Pictures, and Numbers to answer the following questions about anything one observes: what do you notice? what does it remind you of (and why)? what does it lead you to wonder?
Along the way, questions will bubble up, giving a brief dopamine rush — regardless of whether an answer ever emerges.
And then there’s the soothing of the nervous system provided by exposure to the natural world — a tree branch or a clam shell.
