Exploring the Great Outdoors: Using a Book Creator Nature Journal

This week is International Nature Journaling Week and World Environment Day, and you can celebrate them by taking your students outside to explore your schoolyard.

I made this Nature Journal so that you can encourage students to engage with their environment in a meaningful and interactive way.

Why use a Nature Journal?

Keeping a nature journal is an excellent way to improve observation skills, cultivate curiosity, and promote environmental awareness. Students can document their thoughts, feelings, and observations about the natural world in their journals, and by using Book Creator, they can enhance their journals with multimedia elements such as photos, videos, audio recordings, and drawings, making their journals more engaging, interactive, and also collaborative.

Nature journaling is an excellent way for students to engage in interdisciplinary learning. They can use literacy skills to describe the scientific and geographic world around them. This journal can be beneficial in various classes, such as social studies, where it can be used to view the world from a geographic lens; in science classes, where it can be used to view the world from a biological or geological lens; and even in world languages classes, where students can learn new vocabulary to describe the world around them.

Using this journal could also be a jumping-off point for students to use the Design Thinking Notebook or Engineering Notebook to solve an issue they witnessed in the environment that they feel passionate about.

How to use this journal

Here are some helpful tips for using the Nature Journal in your outdoor classroom:

1. Remix: You can make and customize your copy of the book to fit your specific lesson needs.
2. Reorder/Remove: Feel free to remove pages that don't align with your lesson goals or student requirements. You can also rearrange the pages to suit the flow of your instruction better.
3. Assign: Give each student a copy of the Nature Journal to open on their device.
4. Get outside! If your schoolyard doesn't have WiFi, students can use their devices outside to capture images and videos and then use the notebook as a reflection piece when they return to the classroom.
5. Repeat! Have your students visit the same environment at different school year seasons and document the changes they see in the world around them.