Field guide for finding, observing, and identifying plants and animals in North American cities.

Tells readers the best way to spot birds while walking through their backyard, providing a place to sketch a map and write field notes, and introduces the characteristics and behaviors of different birds so that they may be easily identified.

Clare Walker Leslie shows kids how to experience nature with all five senses, whether they live in the countryside, a major city, or somewhere in between. Guiding children through inspiring activities like sketching wildlife, observing constellations, collecting leaves, keeping a weather journal, and watching bird migrations, The Nature Connection encourages kids to engage with the world outside and promotes a lifelong love of nature.

Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (BFSU) - BFSU is for teachers, homeschoolers, and other educators to deliver a first-rate science education to K-8 students and older beginning-science learners. Vol. I (here) is for grades K-2 and older beginning-science learners. Volumes II and III are for grades 3-5, and 6-8, and older progressing science learners. BFSU provides both teaching methodologies and detailed lesson plans embracing and integrating all the major areas of science. BFSU lessons follow structured learning progressions that build knowledge and develop understanding in systematic incremental steps. BFSU lessons all center around hands-on experience and real-world observations. In turn, they draw students to exercise their minds in thinking and drawing rational conclusions from what they observe/experience. Therefore, in following BFSU, students will be guided toward conceptual understanding of crosscutting concepts and ideas of science, as well as factual knowledge, and they will develop mind skills of scientific thinking and logical reasoning in the process. Implementing BFSU requires no particular background in either science or teaching. Teachers/parents can learn along with their children and be excellent role models in doing so. Already widely used and acclaimed in its 1st edition form, this second edition of BFSU contains added elements that will make it more useful in bringing students to master the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Guides teachers through a variety of projects, samples, and classroom anecdotes that demonstrate how teachers can help students become more effective writers of good nonfiction.

Cities are often thought to be separate from nature, but recent trends in ecocriticism demand that we consider them as part of the total environment. This new collection of essays sharpens the focus on the nature of cities by exploring the facets of an urban ecocriticism, by reminding city dwellers of their place in ecosystems, and by emphasizing the importance of this connection in understanding urban life and culture. The editors—both raised in small towns but now living in major urban areas—are especially concerned with the sociopolitical construction of all environments, both natural and manmade. Following an opening interview with Andrew Ross exploring the general parameters of urban ecocriticism, they present essays that explore urban nature writing, city parks, urban "wilderness," ecofeminism and the city, and urban space. The volume includes contributions on topics as wide-ranging as the urban poetry of English writers from Donne to Gay, the manufactured wildness of a gambling casino, and the marketing of cosmetics to urban women by idealizing Third World "naturalness." These essays seek to reconceive nature and its cultural representations in ways that contribute to understanding the contemporary cityscape. They explore the theoretical issues that arise when one attempts to adopt and adapt an environmental perspective for analyzing urban life. The Nature of Cities offers the ecological component often missing from cultural analyses of the city and the urban perspective often lacking in environmental approaches to contemporary culture. By bridging the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and urban experience, the book makes a statement of lasting importance to the development of the ecocritical movement.

For the littlest scientists, the whole wide world can be a laboratory for learning. Nurture their natural curiosity with A Head Start on Science, a treasury of 89 hands-on science activities specifically for children ages 3 to 6. The activities are grouped into seven stimulating topic areas: the five senses, weather, physical science, critters, water and water mixture, seeds, and nature walks.