ABOUT THE FILM
In our modern world, many children instantly recognize dozens of corporate logos but can’t identify their local plants or birds. According to the Independent, young people spend between 4 and 9 hours on a screen each day. This lack of connection to nature has profound implications for our children’s mental and physical health as well as the health of our communities and our natural environment. “If nature experiences continue to fade from the current generation of young people, and the next, and the ones to follow, where will future stewards of the earth come from?” asks Richard Louv, author of The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, in this interview with the Greater Good Science Center at U.C. Berkeley.

How can we help children reconnect with nature?

A powerful and inspiring new educational model in Plumas County, California, offers an innovative solution that is changing children’s lives. In this small, rural community, the local environment is an integral and integrated part of the students’ daily lives and learning. Every school has an outdoor classroom, called a Learning Landscape, within a 10-minute walk, and teachers are empowered and encouraged to take children there at least once a week. Every child in every grade in every school in the entire district spends time in nature and works in a nature journal every week. 

Here, connection to, exploration of, and care for nature is integrated into the K-12 curriculum throughout the district. Outdoor learning is accessible, frequent, and meaningful.  In the sixth grade–which in the program is known as the Watershed year–children and teachers take a multi-day field trip journey following a drop of water from the top of their watershed through the foothills, the delta, the estuary, and to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, they learn about all the ways that water is used, wasted, diverted, and stored.

By the time these children complete sixth grade they have explored, learned, studied, and nature journaled about the insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, birds, and their watershed itself. 

They have become Mountain Kids–kids who know their local nature and they care about it. 

As these Mountain Kids enter middle school and high school, they engage even more deeply with the local environment, taking on research projects with biologist partners, studying fire science, and volunteering as leader mentors to the younger Mountain Kids in the community. 

We know of no other program like this in a public school in the country. The Wild Wonder Foundation is creating a documentary short film to elevate this program as an effective model and to inspire others to create similar programs across the U.S. and around the world that help children connect with, learn from, and care for nature. The film includes interviews with the program’s 30-year champion, Rob Wade, the Outdoor Education and Science Coordinator for the Plumas County Office of Education; as well as with award-winning author, educator, scientist, and nature journaling innovator John Muir Laws, who began working with Rob and the teachers and children in Plumas County in 2016. 

The film will include the benefits of nature connection and nature journaling on children's educational experience as well as their social-emotional learning and resilience in the face of natural catastrophes such as the pandemic and local wildfires as well as the rise of anxiety and addiction to screens. Watershed will be among the first films to highlight nature journaling as a powerful multidisciplinary educational tool that also supports children’s social-emotional learning, a critical component in this age of addiction to screens and rising anxiety in young people.

Helping children connect to nature has numerous benefits for their mental and physical health, academic outcomes, and future as nature stewards. As John Muir Laws explains in the film, the process of nature journaling helps children pay attention and fall in love with nature, and when we fall in love with a place, we are motivated to take care of it.

“We are bringing up a generation of students that will enjoy, care about, and protect our outdoor places.”

— Nicholle Crowther, Vice Principal, Chester Elementary School, Plumas County (from the Learning Landscapes website)