Nature — Sense of Wonder — By Guest Mom Burgin Streetman

We all need nature, and the sooner your child learns to appreciate and love the outside world, the richer his connection will be to the people, animals, and plants that flourish around him. My parents read The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson right after it came out in 1965, and it forever changed how they would pass the natural world onto my sisters and me.

Summers when I was a child never officially began until my mom took us down to the corner store to buy butterfly nets. Many a June/July day was spent watching a caterpillar turn into a luna moth through the side of a Mason jar or nursing an injured baby squirrel back to health. I grew up exploring 20 acres on the marsh and was always tromping, digging, and climbing. Even if your kids are apartment or city bound, you can get them to stop and spy a line of ants or smell the flowers where they grow, even if only in a window pot.



In my son August’s case, when he can’t be trekking around our farm looking for roadrunners, chasing geese, and searching for deer tracks, I’ve brought the outside world in by turning his room into a mini ecosystem filled with mice, hamsters (How rad are these new Habitrails?), goldfish, cotton, pine cones, leaves, feathers, sea shells and just about anything else you can feed or find.



August has a special shelf just for his vintage Little Golden Guides and loves to sit for hours with a 1977 Audible Audubon player (just like the one I had way back when) and name the birds by sight while quietly listening to their songs. The first television we ever let him watch were nature videos and the 1974 documentary Animals Are Beautiful People is still one of his favorites. (Check it out if you wanna see a sidewinder literally run across the desert!) My husband is waiting in the wings to share his childhood fave Hatari! with August, and though the African animal trapping scenes are awesome, the John Wayne love angle can probably wait a few years.

As with anything, if you choose wisely, you can infuse nature into every aspect of your family life. That is why I love the Children & Nature Network, a non-profit organization with the one and only goal of giving every child in every community a wide range of opportunities to experience nature directly. They are all about getting kids back to nature no matter where their roots are grounded.