Sharing Nature With Children by Joseph Bharat Cornell (1979)

This book is fantastic. I first read his second book, "Sharing Nature with Children 2", and I was disappointed. It seemed to focus more on adult activities. Not true with this book! This book is full of wonderful ideas for sharing nature with children. I am a homeschooler, and my children spend a lot of time outside, but for our nature studies I wanted to bring them a more guided approach to nature walks.

The children are more focused and peaceful when we are doing one of the activities in the book. On one walk we played "Meet a Tree". I blindfolded her and lead her to a tree. I asked her to explore the tree with her hands, and explore the ground around the tree. Are the branches low? Can you put your arms around the trunk? Then I led her back to where we started, removed the blindfold, and she could then guess her tree. As Mr. Cornell says, suddenly a forest is a group of individual trees. Next we traded and I was blindfolded. After the neighborhood schoolchildren came home, she organized a game of "Meet a Tree" for everyone!

This book is full of ideas like "Meet a Tree". I would say about half of the activities require a group of 4 or more children, and half could be done with a single child.

Joseph Cornell also spends some time talking about his experiences with children in nature, which left me feeling very inspired!

I think it is a great book for all parents and teachers.