Nature Journaling

WHY NATURE JOURNALING?

Nature journaling is an amazing way to support your students in connecting to the world around them. It is possible to implement these strategies for people of all ages as we can all get better at noticing and wondering what is around us. iNaturalist and other apps are useful as a complementary tool to increase our own ability to notice and wonder.

One of the best resources for integrating nature journaling into your classroom I have found is the free downloadable curriculum from John Muir Laws, How to Teach Nature Journaling. I think that we should be spending more time outside connecting with nature and the more we do this, the more we will develop students connection to place and encourage their positive environmental encounters (6). In this community, it is not just about making pretty pictures, it is about bringing all your powers of observation and focus to a task to learn more about it. This is the power of learning more about this amazing technique. Start with a basic video like Getting Started with Nature Journaling. I hope you can learn more too!

Do you need more help getting started? Examples and Resources

Example: Whale Watching in the Monterey Bay

Here is an example of a recent whale watching adventure I went on with my nature journal in hand. Being able to record what I was noticing allowed me to connect more deeply with the event and now, it helps me to remember what I was thinking about and wondering while I was out on the boat. There is an iNaturalist project on California Whales that anyone who sees a whale can contribute their observations.

Also, my photos do not include some of the smaller things I was able to notice like trails of salps under and near the boat. Salps are tunicates, which are organisms with a notochord, which makes them look like jellies but actually a precursor to vertebrates. I have long been fascinated by salps and they may have been overlooked if I had only been looking for the whales. We saw orcas too, so overall it was a wonderful day.

I am lucky because I do not get seasick! So I can draw while I am on the boat. John Muir Laws has several video lessons on how to draw whales including Whale Illustration Basics, How to Draw Whales in the Wild, and How to Draw Whales and Waves. If you are going whale watching or taking your students out, you can prepare them for what they are going to see with these very useful tutorials.

Example: Field Trip with the California Naturalists to look for Galls!

Galls are created when wasps lay eggs on leaves or branches and force the tree to make the gall. They are amazing structures! One of our local California Naturalists, Merav Vonshak, created an iNaturalist bioblitz project, Galls of California, to collect as many gall observations as possible over a week in October 2021. This is an example of how a person can create a public project that anyone can contribute too. I was lucky enough to go on a field trip with Merav to look for galls so I used the opportunity to draw and wonder in my nature journal.

Resources

John Muir Laws: Nature Stewardship Through Science, Education and Art: This fabulous web site includes links to free online lessons, workshops, events, educator resources, podcasts, a conference, store, and ways to connect with or start a local nature journal club in your area.

Bay Nature is a local group which publishes a magazine as well as frequent talks about local natural history topics in the Bay Area: https://baynature.org/bay-nature-talks/

Here is one where Jack Laws discusses Nature Journaling, and another example about Living on Public Lands.

The California Academy of Sciences has an amazing resource page on how to set up science notebooks with your students. Many of these ideas are useful for nature journaling or will support this behavior as well.

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