Purpose: Students will produce a journal like collection of items and written entries that reflects on their feelings about "natural things" and "wild places." Students will express in writing at least one value they see in preservation of a wild place.

Activity 1: Setting the Stage

Materials: example poems, journal entries, photographs, artwork, tape of natural sounds, leftovers of nature (seed pod, feather, leaf or leaf skeleton, rock, crystal, interesting bit of weathered wood etc.)

Duration: variable, minimum suggested time frame: one week with at least 15 minutes per day of quiet time offered in class. Students will also need to work on the journal in their own time.

California Academic Standards that this lesson meets:

Introduction/Background: Journals have been kept by countless people throughout history. A journal is a tool for capturing thoughts, ideas, reflections, images, and feelings. Many naturalists have kept journals as they traveled and studied their environment. These journals are not limited to written entries of empirical data, but contain snatches of ideas, sketches, poems, even bits and pieces of an experience. Keeping a journal allows us to capture a moment or idea before it escapes us, gives us a chance to take a second look. A journal is a tool to help train all of our senses, to make us better observers. A journal is a record of ideas an information that may later give insight or answer to things we question or are curious about. Journals can also be creative; they can be factual; the best seem to be a combination of both. A log diary is a journal. So is any kind of record of any part of a person's life. A photo album is a kind of journal (though the meaning and remembrances will be lost if never written down), a baby book or a scrap book can be journals. People who have kept journals: Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Thoreau, Eleanor Roosevelt, Enos Mills, John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard. There is no wrong way to keep a journal. Students will make written journal entries, photographic or artistic entries in a book-like format. Students might also make a tape of favorite wild sounds - taken from any source to keep in a pocket inside the back cover of their journal.

Directions for Activity One:

1. Introduce the concept of keeping a journal. Tell students that they will be working on discovering one new thing about the natural environment around them. Let them know they will need a notebook or scrapbook of some kind. Then let them think about it for a few days - make no demands, set no time limits at this point.

2. Some time later (after lunch, or a day or two) ask the students what they think of keeping a journal; ask them if they have already noticed themselves taking note of things around them. Did just knowing that they needed to discover something new about the environment make them look more closely? You may want to have students read selections from Walt Whitman's "Songs of Myself." Have them focus in on his careful observations of the world around him from the smallest blade of grass to the soaring eagle. As a lead into the nature journal students can follow Whitman's style and create I am poems. Encourage them to be boastful and to focus on their personal connection to the natural world around them. If students aren't enthusiastic about keeping a journal. Share the background information and/or ask them to pick something they really enjoy knowing a lot about. For example: music, sports, a hobby, the intricacies of the lives of the characters of their favorite soap opera, a favorite video game, a favorite pet. Have them start their journal with approach number one.

3. A few suggestions on ways to begin their journal:

• The Favorite Thing Approach. Start with the thing you really enjoy knowing a lot about and write about it - use the "hot pen" or "freewrite" technique: write about anything that comes into your head, in any order, with no concern about spelling, sentences etc. for three minutes. After three minutes compare what you have written to any natural "wild" thing, a river, a mountain, a leaf, a coyote chasing its tail. Then draw an abstract little sketch, or find a photo, or add some color. Have students pull the most descriptive, vivid words from their writing to focus their thoughts.
• The Five Senses Approach. Find a place where something catches your eye. Sit and observe, use your five senses, touch, feel, hear, see, and taste. Record your observations and ideas, what did you notice, how did you feel about this place? You can introduce students to this type of exploration by using different pieces of fruit (See Dissecting Fruit under the extensions section)
• The I Just Don't feel Creative Approach. Become the scientist naturalist. Find a piece of anything; a rock, a plant, an animal, a brick, a piece of litter. Describe the item in detail, color texture, weight, shape, measurements, enough detail that another person could identify, draw, or recreate the item you selected without knowing what it is. After you've finished your descriptions, try to determine the purposes of the characteristics you've recorded; why is it that color, what purpose does the texture serve? If ideas and reflections begin to flow . . . go for it, record them too. If they don't, it's okay, study and learning give insights into many other things. Recording the observations is the important part. Have students try personifying the object they observed - how would you feel as a leaf stomped on by human feet? Imagine an ant's perspective on the world. Have them try creating a poem or short story from that object's point of view. Although it would be best to have an object in hand students can also explore several natural items through a web quest at London's Natural History Museum web site.
• The Imitate a Mushy - Flowery - Philosophical Poet Approach. Journals are great places to get a little silly and be creative. Do your version of Shakespeare's "description of a tree." Imagine your self to be a minimalist; find five words that describe an object, but don't relate at all to each other, add an illustration. Outline a bunch of things that strike your fancy (hand, leaf, rock, caterpillar) and write a haiku inside it. Write a verse for the "ballad of the bull thistle" or anything else that would make a good country song (or Arthurian ballad for that matter.)
• Have students react/respond to quotes/readings about the wilderness as a catalyst for getting students to think about natural places.

3. Encourage students to have the first few pages of their journals filled in one sitting - filled with anything. If you need a deadline for this, give them some lead time. The 15 minutes in class can be used for recalling notes, expanding on ideas, deciding where they might go to observe next, and after a few days, for voluntary sharing in small groups. You may even want to provide some artistic media they might not have access to otherwise; paints, adhesive plastic, a mortar and pestle for grinding leaves and other sources of natural pigments.

Activity Two: Journalling - Layers of the Landscape

Materials: Regional Natural History Guide, journal, pencil or pen, landscape

Duration: 2 hours

California and National Academic Standards

Directions:

1. Have students find a spot they will be sitting in for the duration. They should be writing a small area visible to the teacher (teachers discretion), and be alone, working independently.

2. Students will use the natural history guide to find the information. It is best to view a landscape that has "layers," so they see elevation changes or landscape changes. The layers can be something like this:

• where you are sitting - your immediate environment, ten feet around you
• foreground - 20 feet to 100 feet around you
• background - the farthest distance you can see

3. In a general overview of the landscape, have students describe the ecological and geological phenomenon in the landscape. Imagination is crucial here! Slope, sun moisture, temperature can be imagined for the landscape. For students using GLOBE protocols this can be a good place to record actual data including cloud cover, etc.

4. Using the natural history guide, describe at least two plants, two animals, two birds, and two species of trees for each of the layers of the landscape. Be sure to consider shape, size, texture, smell, color, sound, etc.

5. Have students sketch at least one tree, plant or the landscape they see.

6. The activity can be concluded by bringing the students together and having them share a part of all of their experience, including how it felt to be alone and quiet, thinking about the landscape.

7. Some options:

• set a time to quit making entries, collect the journals for a week, return them to the students to read and make final entries. This final entry should include something they discovered about the world around them, about wild places, about their thoughts.
• Have them envision a wild place where they could go to live or pursue one of their ideas. They should describe this place. Have students share their place descriptions. Discuss where these places might be found. Are these places valuable - even if you may never get to go there?
• Have students research other journals. Have them find a quote they particularly appreciate and put it in the next to last page of their journal. Have them make their own quote on the last page. Refer to this example of a nature journal entry (this is college level writing so you may want to review it first). Other examples of nature writing can be found at the Mansfield University site.
• Other nature writing ideas can be obtained at: naturewriting.com and about.com

Evaluations/Outcome: Students should be able to identify if

Extensions:

1. Have students expand their landscape journals through creative writing assignments. Students can create poems about their landscape or create a short story or drama in which their landscape takes central stage. Have students imagine how their landscape will look years from now or have them research how the area appeared thousands of years ago. Get the students to look at human impact on their landscape and record their feelings about the issue of human use of natural places. One way to do this is to have students find pictures of the same site taken over time - how has the landscape changed over time? (They can consider how Yosemite looked prior to becoming a national park and after, how their home town looked before the Industrial revolution and after etc.)

2. There are several poetry exercises/sites that can expand the students creative journal entries. These exercises can be done at any time in the Journalling process.

Dissecting Fruit - Give students a brief background on the Imagists - plain, concrete, language - everyday objects (plums, red wheel barrow etc.) no symbolism. Have your students read poems by William Carlos Williams and other imagists - have students pull out the descriptive words in the poems and share them with the class. Discuss descriptive language. Have students work in groups of three or four, give each group a piece of fruit. Have them describe what it looks like, what it feels like, what it smells like, and what it tastes like. Try describing it as if to someone who had never seen one before. List descriptive words on the board. Define Imagery - Creating pictures with words:

Watermelon

Dribbling from chins;

Leaving the best part,

The black bullet seeds,

To be spit out in rapid fire

Hand out a list of descriptive words. Create a poem about the fruit using the descriptive words you have written down - you can work with a partner if you want to or select another object and create a poem being as descriptive as possible

• If you want students to critique their nature poetry or their peers have them read the suggestions at the Albany Poetry Workshop.
• Students can take words from their nature journals and create their poems on-line using Magnetic Poetry or Interactive Poetry
• Haikus traditionally deal with nature - there are examples of haikus and writing exercises students can try.
• Other poetry exercises can be found at The AlienFlower poetry workshop and the Albany Poetry Workshop.

3. Students can submit their nature art, poetry and prose for publication by Petroglyph or have them produce a piece of writing or art about watersheds specifically to enter the River of Words contest.

4. Have students listen to a tape of nature sounds. Have them write whatever the sounds make them think of. You can also introduce the poetic term onomatopoeia and have students write down the sounds they hear based on this idea. Listen to a tape of Aldo Leopold's writings, or Thoreau's. Have students draw what the words bring to mind - remember drawings can be impressionistic.

5. Have students make a tape of their own. Either from real sounds they tape outside (hard to do) or a composite of other tapes. It should be something that makes them feel like putting ideas in their journal or makes them feel like they are in one of their wild places.