Mark Baldwin

Nature Journaling Tip #8: Creating a Classroom Nature Center

Nature journals support a classroom environment that promotes science inquiry and literacy. Encourage your students to bring objects from outdoors such as leaves, cones, seedpods, mussel shells, and fossils. Leave bird nests and feathers where you find them, though; federal and state-issued permits are required to collect these.

Designate one area of the classroom the "nature center" and along with many objects include a set of hand lenses, posters and nature magazines. Easy-care classroom pets and plants can find a home here as well. If possible have your classroom nature center look out onto a bird feeder and have binoculars and field guides on hand so students can identify what they see and record in their journals.

Classroom pets: stick insects, fish, hamsters, etc. can all find a home here. Also consider having a large jar or terrarium dedicated to keeping locally captured organisms temporarily for class viewing. Arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, etc. may safely be kept for a day or two so students can draw and write about them.  

Journal Entry - Derrel Blain
 

Image by artist Derrel Blain. See more of Derrel's work. 

Next week's tip: More Classroom Nature Center Ideas

Mark Baldwin is the Director of Education at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History (RTPI), a proud partner in National Environmental Education Week. Each year RTPI offers online workshops for educators interested in bringing nature journaling into the classroom. For more information visit www.rtpi.org.

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Carol
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Re: Nature Journaling Tip #8: Creating a Classroom Nature Center
Reply #1 on : Thu April 17, 2008, 08:06:59
I like to have my studnets start with a an assignment with the promp "Draw a home", then we tlk about perspective. A home can be an ant hill or a spiders web. It doesn't have to be a person's home, etc. I have shown my students my nature journaling book and "Keeping a Nature Journal" by Claire Walker and Chuck Roth, to give them an idea of what they can do. I also encourage them to had a "sit spot" where they can return to to just observe and become part of the niche they are sitting in.