Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and full use of senses. Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of the confusion. Nature can frighten a child, too, and this fright serves a purpose. In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy; a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.
Richard Louv
Last child in the Woods

Using the Core Routines to Connecting Kids to Nature

From Jon Young's Coyote's Guide to Connecting With Nature.

"The Core Routines of Nature Connections are things people do to learn nature’s ways. They aren’t lessons. They aren’t knowledge. They are learning habits. Luckily for us as nature guides, shifting our mental habits into these Core Routines of Nature Connection comes as second nature to all human beings. This way of knowing was not born a few hundred years ago, or even with the rise of civilization thousands of years ago. Rather than informing, our teaching job educates ourselves and those we mentor to discover what the Haudenosaunee people call our “original instructions.” Humans evolved with original instructions
designed for dynamic awareness of nature. If we can inspire practice of these Core Routines, remembering our original instructions will happen on its own."

The naturalist staff at Devil's Gulch model the core routines and guide the students everyday to make the core routines a habit. The Ranch is blessed with a wealth of natural beauty and is a wonderful place for observing plant and animal life at close range within the ranch and adjacent Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Samuel P. Taylor State Park forests, meadows, and creeks.

Sit spot

The idea is simple: guide people to find a special place in nature and then become comfortable with just being there, still and quiet. In this place, the lessons of nature will seep in. Sit Spot will become personal because it feels private and intimate; the place where they meet their curiosity; the place where they feel wonder; the place where they get eye-to-eye with a diversity of life-forms and weather-patterns; the place where they face their fears—of bugs, of being alone, of the dark—and grow through them; and the place where they meet nature as their home.

Story Telling

Story telling knits the society together. The men would go out for a day of tracking and hunting, while grandmothers and children might harvest berries, root vegetables, or bark to make thread and cloth. Around the fire at night they would gather and report the stories of their days. This exchange of stories seems to be very important to humans.

Expanding Our Senses

For nature connection, we use only one golden rule: notice everything. Get down in the dirt and feel it. Widen to Owl Eyes (a name we like to give to peripheral vision) and detect movement. Hear the far-off cry of the hawk and the wind in the trees. Smell
the scent carried in the warm breeze. Feel the direction of sun. Taste the safe wild edibles. At every opportunity, we alert our students to expand their senses until doing so becomes routine, a practice, a habit, a discipline, and finally, a brain pattern.

Questioning and Tracking

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
Like peering through a window into wildlife, tracking animals can be endlessly fascinating. By capturing imagination and empathy, it demands whole-brain intelligence and concentration. Getting down on all fours and staring at the footprints
of animals offers a particular abundance of opportunity for imprinting search images. Like reading, studying the sign and following the trails of animals, develops powers of pattern recognition that stay with you for the rest of your life.

Animal Forms

Animal Forms in a Nutshell: Physically, mentally, and emotionally imitate any and all animals in their movements, behaviors, and personalities. A Long Tradition of Imitation This potent routine might seem a bit different from the others, more akin to dance
than mental gymnastics. What we call Animal Forms simply imitates the physical and mental actions of animals, birds, and to some extent even grass, wind and water. This kind of practice can be found in cultures across the globe. For instance, think of the many martial arts from Asia based on imitation of animals, such as crane, tiger, or turtle. Also, many indigenous cultures conducted imitative dances and dramas, often with accompanying masks and costumes. The Hawaiian Hula, an ancient and modern dance form, brilliantly demonstrates such animal and nature dances. Cave paintings in Europe and old European stories indicate that the ancestors of Europeans did the same.

The students through observation get in to their heads how the animals walk, run, eat, dance, and then in games the staff have the students model those animal forms.

Wandering

Wander through the landscape without time, destination, agenda, or future purpose; be present in the moment; and go off-trail wherever curiosity leads. Hmmm …an educational activity without purpose? A walk in nature without a destination or intent? Are we serious?

Unstructured Time Yes, we feel so serious about this routine, that most of our programs have a built-in “wander” or “walkabout” for about half of our time out in the field. We call this “The 50-50 Principle.” We plan our whole day to follow a structure, but count on fifty-percent of the time in the excitement of the moment, involving timeless, unstructured Wandering. There is nothingto accomplish, nowhere to go. By just being present in the moment, curiosity gently leads us wherever we go.

Exploring Field Guides

We a extensive naturalist library for the students to browse through field guides as treasure-chests of knowledge that fill up the
vacuum of your curiosity about nature.
When people want scientific information, how can we help them find it for themselves? Teaching them to Explore Field Guides makes them life-long, self-sufficient citizen-scientists of the natural world.

Mapping

Orient to the compass directions, and perceive the landscape from a bird’s eye view. Draw maps to locate features of the landscape or tell stories that map your explorations. A natural routine familiar to anyone who’s ever driven in a big city, mapping orients us and shows us the gaps in what we notice. It creates a need for people to know what bird that was by the swamp, or where that creek goes. It also brings the landscape to life as the diversity of natural signposts emerges through the connections between birds and berry bushes, between coyote scat and vole-filled meadows, between bodies of water and the daily movements of animals.

Survival Living

Student interact with the natural world around as if their
entire subsistence depended on it, including all the
basic human needs: shelter, water, fire, food, tools, and
clothing. Nothing gives us more meaningful relationships with nature than really putting ourselves out in the elements and living off the land. It creates the ultimate need to learn.  

Journal

stories can be told to a journal. With young children this might be done through drawing or art, or dictating to you, the writer. Again, we share many tricks for this which may depend on your skills and the skills objectives of your program

Imagining Mind’s Eye

Use and strengthen your imagination as much as possible, imprinting images in your mind to gather from the experience of all five senses.

This routine develops our imagination and our ability to re-experience events with our eyes closed. To teach “nature literacy,” then see with the Mind’s Eye, we must go one step beyond plain reading into reading with the intent to “learn by heart.” Not only visual images, but also smells, flavors, sounds, and textures imprint in magnificent detail in people’s brain patterns when they rely on their nature literacy for survival. Routinely imagining with our Mind’s Eye allows our sensory experiences to really sink in. This skill provides us with the dynamic memory required for field biology and bird watching and is the evidence of a well-developed “naturalist intelligence.”

Listening for Bird Language

Be still and listen. Quiet down and crane your ears and eyes to notice the vocal signals and body language of birds and other animals, including humans. What message do you hear in their voice?

Thanksgiving

How is “Thanksgiving” a routine for nature awareness? If we all find in yourself a grateful heart and express gratitude for any and all aspects of nature and life, if we begin every episode with thanksgiving and give nods of thanks as you go about your day, then we will redevelop the connections that our ancestors had to have to survive.

Taking a moment to see the grace in elements of the natural world— frogs, rain, berries, or the sun—deepens our relationships with each one. Thanksgiving reinforces the interdependence of all living things and their ground of being, and reminds us of our kinship with nature.

When we say “Thanksgiving,” we mean remembering and expressing gratitude for the things around us that support our lives that make it possible for us to be alive, every day. It is a general sharing of appreciation for things common to all humans, as well as those specific to each of our lives.