It’s that time of year again: time to treat your family and friends (and yourself!) to a special gift! And what makes a better gift than a good book? The second annual Holiday Book Fair, featured resource books from Dr. Carla Gull and Peter Dargatz and children’s book recommendations from speech-language pathologist and self-proclaimed book lover, Ranita Anderson.
Natural Start invited Sarah Heller, co-founder and former director of Fiddleheads Forest School, to share the process she developed at Fiddleheads to enroll families with equity in mind. Sarah has spent the last two years learning about enrollment practices and asking questions with the goal of learning how to build more equitable systems and reduce barriers to accessing nature-based education.
How do we develop programs that are welcoming and inclusive to all members of our communities? What does it mean to be culturally relevant? This forum will explore how parents and educators in one community approach these questions. We heard stories from a public school educator, a parent, and a nature-based preschool founder in Minneapolis, MN, as they shared their different paths to nature and what culturally relevant teaching means to them.
For years, Professor Julie Ernst at the University of Minnesota Duluth has been exploring how nature preschools affect children's curiosity, creativity, executive function skills, and more. In this forum, Julie shares her research and tools she has developed that help make the case for nature-based education.
Willamette Partnership’s Oregon Health & Outdoors Initiative partnered with outdoor early childhood experts across the country to develop the "Outdoor Preschool Policy Action Framework." The framework helps advocates — from parents, teachers, and administrators to elected officials — find a pathway to make outdoor preschool available to all. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this work, so this resource identifies many potential options you can use to start moving your state along the pathway to make outdoor preschools available to everyone!
This Natural Start forum explores reflective practice and how it can help educators work through difficult and emotional professional challenges and the stress of teaching.
Nature-based education prioritizes emergent, child-directed learning that’s individualized for each child, but we don’t often follow the same principles when it comes to our own professional learning. In this UnPD forum, we’ll give one another permission to design and facilitate (un)professional development for ourselves that authentically meets our individual and collective needs, rather than subscribing to the traditional school model (hence “unPD”).
In July 2020, the Inside-Outside advisory group collaborated to write a position statement on outdoor learning. This position statement quickly gained the attention of tens of thousands of people interested in how schools can transition learning outdoors as a way to safely reopen in the fall. During NatStart's Nature-Based Early Learning Virtual Conference, Inside-Outside organized a panel of experts—including outdoor educators, administrators, and a pediatrician—to further discuss the benefits and opportunities of outdoor learning during this uncertain time.
The Natural Start Alliance partnered with the National Farm to School Network for the webinar, “Aligning Outdoor Learning & Farm to ECE.” Explore resources for connecting Farm to Early Care and Education and outdoor learning.
The Early Childhood Environmental Education Rating Scale provides a collaborative tool for educators and others to discuss their early childhood environmental education program goals, consider strengths and areas of needed improvement, and chart a future direction for program development.
Early Childhood Environmental Education Programs: Guidelines for Excellence identifies key characteristics of high-quality early childhood environmental education programs to help educators, administrators, and program developers to design and deliver high-quality environmental education programs for young children.
In this interactive webinar, presenters provided strategies to facilitate students' interaction with nature, particularly with students who live in areas where substantial inequities exist between children and their lack of access to a clean and healthy environment.
