"I notice the leaf looks like a 3 headed lizard. I wonder what tree my leaf is from. The leaf reminds me of bacteria."
By Rob Wade, Greater Good Magazine, Image: from article, February 11, 2025
A place-based educator in California invites his students to spend time in, observe, and document the wild nature around them.
As temperatures cool and snow begins to grace the northern Sierra Nevada’s ridges and peaks, the “Mountain Kids” of Plumas County carry a simple but transformative tool in their backpacks: a nature journal. These journals capture each student’s experiences in pictures, words, and numbers, each page becoming a window into their weekly adventures.
I have been a place-based educator for three decades. Place-based education is a pedagogical approach that centers instruction and learning in the locale where a child lives and attends school. Each place holds nature and culture simultaneously. Children in the primary and intermediate grades are in a developmental stage where the physical and temporal place in front of them and at their feet is the context for cognitive understanding. Place is a literal here and now and also provides a structure of mindfulness.
In Plumas County, our program Outdoor Core combines nature journaling with a broader place-based curriculum, where students connect with nearby natural spaces and their own sense of self as a Mountain Kid. Through this program, which has been going on for two decades, each child develops their unique connections to the land, drawing out their own “aha” moments, discoveries, and reflections in journals that become personal archives of place and time and self.
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