Community-Based Environmental Learning: Books

Sow the seeds of science and wonder and inspire the next generation of Earth stewards The School Garden Curriculum offers a unique and comprehensive framework, enabling students to grow their knowledge throughout the school year and build on it from kindergarten to eighth grade.

The ABCs of Ecology is designed to inspire educators to teach young curious adventurers (upper elementary and middle school students) how to have fun outside and make connections to real world environments - be it school yard, backyard, or local parks and nature areas.

Clare Walker Leslie shows kids how to experience nature with all five senses, where ever they live. The Nature Connection guides children through inspiring activities like sketching wildlife, observing constellations, collecting leaves, keeping a weather journal, and watching bird migrations.

The first-ever comprehensive book devoted to helping educators use nature journaling as an inspiring teaching tool to engage young people with wild places. Available as a free PDF download from the John Muir Laws website!

Educating for Sustainability presents fundamental principles, theoretical foundations, and practical suggestions for integrating education for sustainability into existing schoolwide systems and programs.

Discover how nature study can help students become careful, intentional observers of all they see, growing into stronger readers, writers, mathematicians, and scientists in the process.

Outdoor Inquiriesoffers approaches to help students become skilled at asking their own questions, gathering their own data and analyzing it for themselves-to become real inquirers.

Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things--from strawberries and witch hazel to water lilies and lichen--provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass.

This young adult adaptation of acclaimed geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren's highly respected nonfiction work is the perfect book for those interested in learning about climate change and how they can contribute to creating a more sustainable future.

This fortieth anniversary edition celebrates Rachel Carson's watershed book with a new introduction by Terry Tempest Williams and a new afterword by the Linda Lear, who tells the story of Carson's courageous defense of her truths in the face of ruthless assault from the chemical industry in the year following the publication of Silent Spring and before her untimely death in 1964.