A Place for Wonder

Just published! A Place for Wonder offers a variety of projects that primary teachers can weave into existing routines as they teach nonfiction literacy. Click here to preview the entire book online!

In A Place for Wonder, Georgia Heard and Jennifer McDonough discuss how to create "a landscape of wonder," a primary classroom where curiosity, creativity, and exploration are encouraged. For it is these characteristics, the authors write, that develop intelligent, inquiring, life-long learners.
The authors' research shows that many primary grade state standards encourage teaching for understanding, critical thinking, creativity, and question asking, and promote the development of children who have the attributes of inventiveness, curiosity, engagement, imagination, and creativity. With these goals in mind, Georgia and Jennifer provide teachers with numerous, practical ways—setting up "wonder centers," gathering data though senses, teaching nonfiction craft—they can create a classroom environment where students' questions and observations are part of daily work.
They also present a step-by-step guide to planning a nonfiction reading and writing unit of study—creating a nonfiction book, which includes creating a table of contents, writing focused chapters, using "wow" words, and developing point of view. A Place for Wonder will help teachers reclaim their classrooms as a place where true learning is the norm.

Browse the entire book online!

Photo: Sandy Island, September, 2009. Ellie Goldberg

EARLY SPRING

An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World

by Amy Seidl
reviewed by Alison Hawthorne Deming (http://www.orionmagazine.org)

Beacon Press, 2009. $24.95, 192 pages.

HOW ARE WE TO SEE OURSELVES as characters--as actor--in the enormous story of climate change and the planet's diminishment? How do we change our role in the drama from consumer to caretaker? How are we to think and feel about our bewildering moment in natural history, when the complexity of change is occurring on a scale not observable to the plain eye? Amy Seidl's Early Spring brings complexity home to the author's garden, family, and community in northern Vermont. She moves gracefully among roles as mother, ecologist, neighbor, and thoughtful witness of the everyday. She shows us where to look to see local change in circadian rhythms of both nature and culture: the date the lilacs first bloom or robins arrive, the forestalled annual ice-fishing derby or sugaring-off celebration in maple country. To a trained eye, these changes speak volumes about how creatures, plants, and human communities are being pressed into adaptation.

Seidl writes wonderfully detailed descriptions of complicated processes, such as the "pillow and cradle" features of her local landscape, the process of caterpillar metamorphosis and the peril of Bt toxins, and how plant chemistry responds to increased ultraviolet rays. She shows the value and mechanism of sustained looking: the family journal that spans three generations of data on ice-out on Lake Damariscotta, Maine; the woman in Michigan who observed birds from her kitchen window and recorded their visits for over forty years; and the woman in Massachusetts who kept track of what she saw on daily walks for forty-two years--"when the wood ducks arrive at her pond, the first time she heard the peepers' chorus, and when the wood anemones bloomed"

These compulsive note-takers do more than add information to our overburdened hoard. They are "recording the rhythm of life" around us, Seidl writes, a rhythm that has its analogue in our consciousness. The lilacs in her backyard bloom eight to sixteen days earlier than when she was born, and by the time her daughters are her age they will bloom fourteen to twenty-eight days earlier. We are engaged in a transformation that requires new calibrations of feeling and reflection's well as policy and action.

Seidl's tutelary spirit is Rachel Carson, whose words introduce the chapters of this book. The title Early Spring suggests one of the challenges here: many people in cold climates would be darned happy to have an earlier spring. At this book's conclusion, that benign phrase will begin to have the poetic resonance and urgency of Carson's catalyzing work in Silent Spring.

Activites for Kids in Nature

http://www.naturalland.org/kids_in_nature.htm

Green Projects

Green Projects for the Classroom
Try these great lesson ideas for environmentally conscious teachers (and their lucky students). Credit: iStockphoto

Rachel Carson Contest Winners 2008

EPA's Aging Initiative, Generations United, and the Rachel Carson Council, Inc. are pleased to announce the winners of this year's Rachel Carson "A Sense of Wonder" Intergenerational Essay, Photography, and Poetry Contest.

The categories are Photography, Essay, Poetry and Mixed (Photo, Essay and Poetry).

The contest was designed to increase environmental stewardship and public awareness of environmental issues. This year, the theme is commemorating the 100th anniversary of environmentalist Rachel Carson's life. The contest's intergenerational approach reflects Carson's efforts through her writings to have adults share with children a sense of wonder about nature and help them discover its joys. All teams included both a person under age 18 and a person 50 years of age or older.

More than 140 individuals submitted entries to the Rachel Carson contest. Participants came from all over the US and the world and included intergenerational teams of families, neighbors, friends, and senior centers. Finalists in each category were selected by an intergenerational team of judges. Winners were then selected by public voting on the Aging Initiative website. More than 1,500 individuals cast their votes for their favorite entries.

The categories are Photography, Essay, Poetry and Mixed (Photo, Essay and Poetry).