Article Link: http://www.exchangepress.com/article/wonder----nacc-newsletter/5023579/
Start with Wonder
The reflection shared in this edition broadly reflects the Nature Action Collaborative for Children Universal Principle:
We believe nature based learning environments should inspire wonder and discovery.
Nature is the Essence of Life
Juliana Gatti Pereira Rodrigues, Brazil
Since my early childhood, I have had the opportunity to be in contact with a great diversity of natural environments together with my family. I remember being at my grandparents’ country house gathering strawberries, feeding the chickens, and collecting leaves from different plants. I spent countless hours discovering a huge diversity of insects (their shapes, sizes, colours, and life stages), learning to hear and sing bird songs, finding the perfect stone, picking up fruits to eat, spending lots of time under my three favourite fruit trees — avocado, jaboticaba (endemic to Brazil), and mulberry. I would play with the soil, prepare mud meals, and eat fresh grown fruit. In that special place, feeling complete and one with nature, I could just be — forever; I was totally living my present.
I will never forget that feeling. In part, it is what led me to idealize Instituto Arvores Vivas’s (Living Trees Institute) mission to reconnect children and adults to nature, formed in 2006. To re-establish the connection that ...