With Eyes of Wonder
Laws and Wade Connect Students with Nature…
John Muir Laws (aka Jack) has been studying the natural world in the Sierra Nevada for decades, authoring books including “How to Teach Nature Journaling” and “The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling.” As a storyteller, artist, scientist, educator and naturalist, Laws has been an inspiring character who is constantly bringing his curiosity about the natural world to those around him.
With a mission to make nature and nature journaling accessible to everyone of all ages, the Wild Wonder Foundation formed in 2022 to help drive the culture of the nature journaling practice, as it enhances memory, empathy, peace and mindfulness.
Around the same time Laws was creating interdisciplinary education programs to help students become intentionally curious, his friend and Plumas County Office of Education Outdoor Education and Science Coordinator Rob Wade was building the Learning Landscapes and Outdoor Core program in the Sierra. Soon the two missions intersected.
“Jack and I both come from the environmental outdoor education world,” Wade says. They met 30 years ago at a conference where Wade was learning how to form a sixth-grade outdoor education camp on a property leased by UC Berkeley in the Plumas National Forest. During the conference, Wade and Laws also realized they both attended UC Berkeley around the same time.
Wade had always done field journaling himself and eventually took over the two-day, one-night camp for sixth graders. It eventually evolved into a 20-day rite of passage year and has since expanded into K-12th grade.
Through a stroke of good timing when monies were freed up for restoration following the 2000 Storrie Fire, Wade partnered with the Feather River Land Trust working to conserve as much open space as he could within a 10-minute walk from Plumas County schools. But after the land was secured, there was the question of how to instruct the kids once they left the classroom.
“Teachers were like, ‘When we take the kids outdoors, what do we do when we get out there?’ Nature journaling was the quick answer, it became the cornerstone of the program. That’s when Jack got involved,” Wade says.
The money from the forest service allowed Wade to expand the program across all grades, allowing kids to begin practicing in-school journaling activities punctuated by field trips throughout the school year.
“We created a platform where nature journaling is always relevant. Every day kids have their own experience with it. For me, it’s a generation now; the kids I work with now are the kids of the original Mountain Kids. It’s fun to be a part of that arc of history in building a sustainable culture that will be here forever. This is not a trend. It’s a cultural evolution that will stick and stay. Our framework of time is building it in perpetuity.”
The idea of building a culture of respect and wonder for the environment that endures past his lifetime is like the idea of never enjoying the shade of the trees one has planted.
Younger students go out with a good ol’ pen and paper and create. “Every page has pictures, letters and numbers; those three things are one of the ways those pages come to life,” Wade says.
Paying attention to documenting letters/numbers/pictures on a page is one of Laws’ main teaching triads to help nature illustrators get started, along with giving yourself the three prompts “I wonder…/I notice…/It reminds me of…” when you sit down on a stump, a rock or in the dirt with your pages. But Wade has his own third triad.
“Mine is tapping into the: 1) Genius of the moment (that will never happen again); 2) Genius of my place (that can never be re-created); and 3) Genius of every child (in creating a piece of history that no one else on earth can ever make). Nature is never static. You can catch the moment in the place with the person who’s journaling,” Wade says. “We need people deeply in love with their place on the planet. To me this is a place-based tool bringing to light how nature manifests right here in this unique way in this unique moment, and it’s not exactly the same way anywhere else in the world.”
While to some people it can feel like a luxury to carve out time to sit, ponder and draw outdoors, Wade is committed to making that a common occurrence for all students, taking in the grandeur of a place every single day. Since a place is always changing, it’s always new.
“I don’t take for granted that kids get this experience regularly, like you hear of that Disneyland or Yosemite spike kids get when introduced to it for the first time. But we try to make this common. What is unique is there are so many field trips that I’m not on and it’s teachers that make those happen. I know magic is happening all the time,” Wade adds.
“I’ve had so many experiences with kids who’ve had a huge moment of insight. A huge ‘a-ha’ or being really proud of doing something, like climbing to the top of a mountain. Knowledge is not power; action is power. Knowledge without action is impotence,” Wade says. “So many kids are stunned, amazed, and their hearts and minds are opened when they take that knowledge and apply it.”
He recalls one field trip he was on with a third grader named Maria.
“She was a super tomboy who struggled in school. We were out in the woods and the kids got dropped by a creek and started nature journaling. Maria was distracted the whole time playing in the water—which I love—and didn’t do the work. Afterwards, I asked Maria to say what she smelled out there, and she replied, ‘The air.’ And then I asked her, ‘What does the air smell like?’ She took a deep breath and said, ‘The air smells like freedom.’ Those kinds of moments and insights the kids get to bump into all the time.”
Wade also encourages kids to have a “sit spot” where they become the expert of their unique place. “They love their ‘sit spot’; they’re so proud. It’s private, personal to them, they know it better than anyone else. Being still, some kids don’t get enough of that, and some really struggle with it. But nature has a natural way of caring for a child and a moment. When they get graced by stillness and a quiet, they change. Subtle little experiences they get, learning how to live a meaningful life. When you take those subtle elements of peace and quiet and put them in schools, it shows the kids, ‘This is what we want for you.’ If we don’t give kids that downtime, they might not know it exists,” he adds.
The world would be a better place if we all paid more attention to what is going on around us, but it helps us to learn these natural gifts exist as young as we can and keep reminding ourselves of it.
“I have a real love for phenology, the cycles and currents of the earth, the things that happen to us all the time as we go around the sun. I tell kids they might see something that has never been seen before, by anyone ever. The timing of the cycles… Jack and I geek out on that a lot. Things are changing every single day and if you don’t go outside, you’ll miss it.”
