So you have a garden, but now what do you do with it?
Peppered with anecdotes and friendly advice, while based in research and experience, Wings, Worms, and Wonder: A Guide for Creatively Integrating Gardening and Outdoor Learning answers this question.
Above and beyond gardening guidance on topics such as composting and organic pest control, it gives adults the tools to reconnect themselves and the children in their lives to the natural world through holistic gardening experiences. It will ignite your confidence to create outdoor learning experiences that nurture both wonder and ecological literacy.
It’s never to early to start connecting!
Overflowing with tips for successfully gardening with children in school and community settings, as well as including 40 tested lesson plans and activities, you’ll find everything you need to seamlessly integrate gardening into both elementary curricula and daily life.
Bronze Winner of the 2013 Living Now Books For Better Living Award!
Rooted in scientific and arts based Nature-Study and progressive education models, this guide is invaluable for anyone wanting to grow a thriving children’s gardening program. This book will inspire and equip you to sprout a happier healthier generation of children!
Now in its second edition, Wings, Worms, and Wonder, the book, continues to help connect children and nature worldwide!
Wings, Worms, and Wonder (the company & book) aspires to reconnect children with the natural world and help create future generations of happy, healthy, ecologically literate children who are invested in nature and have a desire to “grow their own.” I hope to reach as many students, teachers and parents as possible and bring nature into your classrooms and homes!
Here I am teaching the Soil Composition Strip lesson to a group of new gardening adults!
They liked it just as much as the children!
That’s all great, but what will this book actually do for you?
Lots!! Wings, Worms, and Wonder will:
1. Provide you with 40 lesson and project plans that integrate garden and nature activities across math, science, language, writing, and history/cultural subject areas
2. Provide you with regionally specific tips, suggestions, and advice for growing successful gardens year round (including what to do with a school garden in the summer)
3. Provide you with the theoretical framework from which school gardening and gardening with children outside the home originated
4. Provide you with the philosophy and methods of the Nature-Study Movement and how they relate to the current educational theories and practices of Montessori, Steiner, and Sobel’s place-based education methods.
5. Provide you with the developmental psychology, educational theory and method, and the historical background and integrative practices needed to “sell” or justify the importance of school gardening, outdoor learning, place connection, and educating for ecological literacy to city councils, school administrations, or parent groups.
See how pretty–it could even be a coffee table book! (Photo credit: The Wooden Bee)
6. Provide you with hundreds of print, online, and supply resources for adults and children divided by subject category
7. Provide you with a passcode to the website’s book owners Garden Party page where you will find 4 bonus lesson plans, PDF downloads of all the book’s research masters and patterns, an expanded table of contents, and a PDF easy to use format compilation of the first year’s Wonder Wednesday Lesson plans from the blog
8. This book will be an ally that will help you boost your confidence and skill set for gardening with children, growing vegetables, connecting youth with place and the natural world, and integrating holistic creative outdoor experiences into children’s lives everyday!
9. Spark your wonder and love for the natural world through it’s full color and fully illustrated format, conversational style, and environmentally responsible and animal friendly printing process!
10. Help you plant the seeds for a future generation of nature lovers who know how to “grow their own” and have an unshakeable commitment to preserving the beauty and biodiversity of our natural world!
Nature Journaling fosters nature connection through a balance of science and the arts.
Don’t take my word for it!
Read some reviews of Wings, Worms, and Wonder!
Click the photo to read a review and interview on EcoEtsy! (Photo credit: The Wooden Bee)