Recently, I’ve been doing workshops for librarians and educators where I present two programs about which I feel very strongly. Nature Detectives and Handmade Books provide a wide variety of opportunities and experiences for children to connect to the environment, express themselves artistically, and grow creatively and intellectually. It occurs to me that it would be great to keep in touch with the people I meet who are also enthusiastic about the programs I share with them. So, why not a blog? I can provide updates, new information, and hopefully create a dialog with others who work with children and feel the urgency to get children envolved with nature, books, and art.
“..it is not half so important to know as it is to feel.”
Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
As Rachel Carson emphasized the importance of a child’s curiosity, exploration and appreciation of the world around us, the program series Nature Detectives celebrates and encourages that part of a child’s world that can stop and wonder at the gifts of nature. Through stories, open-ended questions, shared experiences, specimens and art activities observing, inquiring, questioning, and creating are encouraged.
Through the Section of Education at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History we are able to borrow a wide variety of specimens: mounts, study skins, displays, and topic boxes that inspire lively and enthusiastic discussion filled with questions, observations, and shared experiences. The art activity that concludes the program serves as a creative form of expression that ties it all together. Each child can take their own interpretation of that day’s Nature Detectives home to not only remind them of their afternoon, but to encourage further thought and wonder on their own.
In addition, there is a current realization of the need for children to have access to experience the outdoors. Richard Louv in his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, cites the trend for children nowadays to be engaged in more sedentary indoor activities, thus becoming disconnected from nature. Children need to have a relationship with nature not only for their own health, intellectual and social development, and creativity but for our planet’s survival as well, because they will be its caretakers.
Richard Louv is also the Chairman of The Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit organization that promotes opportunities for children to experience nature and the outdoors. C&NN supports the concept of “Leave No Child Inside” with extensive research and solutions to this problem.
In the Children’s Department at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, we hope that Nature Detectives is one answer that invites children to explore the outdoors and that art can be a vehicle for the expression of that relationship. Over the years that I’ve been doing Nature Detectives an interesting thing has happened. I’ve become more aware of my world. I celebrate the return of the falcons to the Cathedral of Learning, the change of seasons, the emerging monarch butterfly from its crysalis.
“Why is it that while most learning comes through books, so little is processed through the book form?”
Paul Johnson, Literacy Through the Book Arts
Handmade Books
Through a variety of simple folds, a piece of paper can become a blank palette for a magical way to express and share the creativity, stories, and dreams that every child has inside him or her. Although children do love to tell their own stories, a blank piece of lined paper can be intimidating. When I see new faces at Handmade Books I often say, “Did you know that I can make a book out of a single piece of paper?” I’ll demonstrate a simple fold and then the magic of seeing a three-dimensional form being created catches their attention. Place a few glue sticks, scissors, markers and colorful paper in the middle of the table and the sound of stories being told fills the air. The children are eager to make their own books.
Over the years, two very different formats have evolved. Handmade Books focuses on a story or presentation that introduces a selected fold or design, the instruction, and the book making process. Informal Handmade Books, on a Saturday afternoon, offers a sense of leisurely and relaxed creating, often with variety of materials and endless possibilities. Children, parents, grandparents, and caregivers are the participants in what has become a family activity.
