Several of my guests – Kady Yeomans, Claire Dobie, and many more to come – talk about the value of teaching extra cubiculum – outside the classroom, immersed in the nature about which we are teaching. Most naturalists I’ve ever met or worked with simply accept that it just works… that it’s unquestionable that getting...

On this week’s podcast, I talk with Minnesota naturalist Claire Dobie about the job of a nature-based educator. It’s an interesting gig and one I know well, as I did some version of nature-based education for more than a decade before switching over to classroom-focused work. We naturalists, interpreters, rangers, and...

In our conversation this week, Eileen Garcia-Sanchez told me all about how her preschoolers find ball moss on the oak trees. It seems dead – grey and crispy – like so much vegetation after days of scorching Texas sun. But this plant has a surprise … If you give the dried-out balls a little water, they spring back to...

On this week’s podcast, I talk with Eileen Garcia-Sanchez of the San Antonio Zoo in Texas. It’s a fully-accredited preschool that takes a lot of its inspiration from the world of outdoor education. At the school, children spend a majority of their time outdoors, on both the school’s outdoor campus and in the zoo...

Fox tracks and coyote tracks are really hard to tell apart – especially in the snow! For our Fun Fact in this week’s podcast, naturalist Claire Dobie described how she helps kids determine the difference. Want to find out yourself? Well, I won’t leak the secret here, but ur-ine luck! Make a pee-line – I mean, a...