Full Description
Childhood and Nature is a guide for educators looking to foster in their students a love of nature as well as an understanding of complex environmental issues. This second edition brings new material and fresh insights to David Sobel's foundational exploration of place-based education.
Sobel articulates seven design principles that teachers can use to build learning experiences: adventure, fantasy and imagination, animal allies, maps and paths, special places, small worlds, and hunting and gathering,. Pulling from recurrent play themes and real-world examples from educators, Sobel details placed-based projects and lessons for each principle. Students learn and develop vital skills through engagement with their local environments and communities. Miniature ecosystems in the "small world" of a sandbox, for example, can help children grasp larger, abstract ideas.
A timely and actionable resource, Childhood and Nature shows how centering the world around us in education can create a generation of nature students, explorers, and protectors.
Contents
"Appareled in Celestial Light": Transcendent Nature Experiences in Childhood
1. Childhood and Nature Design Principles
2. Playing, Plotting, and Potatoes: Preschoolers Learning in the Garden
3. Taking the Classroom to the Forest: Forest Fridays in Vermont Public School Kindergartens
4. Applying the Design Principles in an Urban Early Childhood Center: Innovation at Velma Thomas Early Childhood
5. Being Hopeful in Spite of It All: A Return to Nature-based Education
6. Forts, Land Trusts, and Conservation Behavior: How Building Forts Leads to Environmental Behavior
7. Island Play: Disney World Is Like a Flea Compared to Whitehead
8. Valley Quest: Strengthening Community through Educational Treasure Hunts
9. Look, Don't Touch: The Problem with Environmental Education
10. Swimming Upstream against the Current: Changing the School Improvement Paradigm
11. Global Climate Change Meets Ecophobia: Developmentally Appropriate Climate Education
12. Place-based Education in Guilford, Vermont, 2005: Teaching Locally, Understanding Globally
13. Place-based Education in Guilford, Vermont, 2020: Still Going Strong
Finding the Good in the Pandemic: Reviving the Nature Study Movement
