Teaching Teachers - Jefferson Nature Center 8-22-09

Hello! I'm still alive ~ I think!
I'd hoped to get this blog entry up a lot sooner ~ it's been a much more than a month since I gave my last workshop, but my time since then has been fully occupied with turning both my Observing Nature Guide (for kids) into a downloadable file, and creating a downloadable Teacher's Manual to go with it. Then I created a webpage within my website to offer them on. It takes so much TIME.

(click on images for a larger view)

The Teacher's Manual (which needed the most work) went through at least ten editing proofs and "reproofs" and a reading or two by my brother, David (who is a treasure), to get it to a usable state. I included examples of what they might expect student journal pages to look like throughout the manual. Course objectives are outlined in the picture at left.

I spent nearly a month adding things to the student workbook, as well. Here are images of two of the pages I added ~ one of mammals they might see, another of interesting things to look for and journal. The latter was fun to write. I put in things like doodlebugs and spittlebugs, galls and bark beetle tunnels, etc. An image of that page is below left.

Then I had to make it available to educators. I am my own webmaster ~ I have written every speck of code from scratch for all 104 pages of my website. (The very thought of having done that gives me heartburn.)

The hardest part of such a page is to get things to download properly when writing the code. I don't do webpages every day, so I forget stuff and sometimes it takes ages to sort through what's wrong. And, of course, I have no one to heap recriminations on if it fails to work properly (THAT'S a drag!).

I sent it to all my sibs when I thought I had it working. As webmaster, I can't test buying the downloads because PayPal won't take my credit card from my site ~ they just set it up that way, for some reason.

Ack! The buttons didn't work properly. My sib-fake-customers paid for their downloads, but the email with the link to the files never arrived in their email boxes. I went back into the code and rewrote it, trying to figure out what could be wrong. Finally, on September 28 I sent an SOS to PayPal to get some troubleshooting help, and we STILL haven't sorted it entirely out.

You can download your book right when you pay for it, no problem, but at the moment, yours truly (I) get the email with the link for downloading it later. I'll send you the link as soon as I spot it in my email box, which I check frequently throughout the day, but if I don't see it right away you may experience a slight delay. But YOU WILL GET YOUR LINK!

I may offer a CD of the workbook and manual as an alternative, in case some people aren't on broadband. I anticipate some of my customers will be home schoolers, who may not even be on the grid. To these folks, downloading anything bigger than a peanut makes them feel faint (and/or frustrates them mightily). Two of my sisters are in that situation ~ one is entirely off the grid ~ so I know whereof I speak.

At any rate.....

The workshop at Jefferson Nature Center, on August 22, was interesting. I had seven students, some of them public elementary and high school teachers this time (the last workshop, while larger, had a teacher or two, but ). These are the very people I have written the Guide and Teacher's Manual for. I had made improvements since the workshop at North Mountain Park, and it's a good thing because this group was much more demanding. The teachers at North Mountain Park Nature Center were mostly planning to work under the auspices of the Nature Center and were mostly volunteers and nature center staff. That nature center has its own Guide which I made specifically for their locale. These participants weren't planning to start from scratch to do it themselves ~ they'd do it in concert with the nature center.

Today's group wanted to know how to take the course and use it for a variety of purposes, and I didn't yet have it available online. Their questions and suggestions really helped me sort out how I wanted to handle availability (which is what precipitated all the webpage stuff at the beginning of this blog).

We met in the JNC meeting room, for the first part of the workshop, where I ran them through the exercises in the student guide just as though they were youngsters (in this workshop I tell them that's what I'm doing so they expect to be guided through as though they were between the ages of eight and fifteen or sixteen.

This gives them the opportunity to watch my teaching methods, compare them with their own methods, and decide what would work best for them with this curriculum, their locale, their students, and their own teaching style.

I went into the mechanics of this workshop rather thoroughly in my last blog, so I don't think I'll repeat that here. The second half of the class was the sketching done outdoors along Bear Creek. The students scattered along the banks and had an absorbing sketching and journaling session. One thing we discovered was that older students ~ highschool age, perhaps ~ could probably go out to sketch and journal for 45 minutes without any problem, whereas 20 minutes is plenty for younger kids.

As they sketched, I went from one to the next, admiring their artwork, identifying natural items they were journaling about (poplar and alder leaves and twigs, galls, etc), refraining from making suggestions to improve their art. The whole idea was to show them that they could teach this without an artistic background, since I was teaching it to them without giving them any art advice at all.

It was a gorgeous day, warm in the sun and cool in the shade, with birdsong, ravens and jays croaking, baby lizards barely 2" long skittering across the sand along the creek (see the picture), etc. The liquid chuckle of the creek masked traffic sounds (the nature center is between a highway and the freeway), and the half hour they spent journaling was a peaceful and rejuvenating time for us all.

It does help to have at least a minimal familiarity with the local flora and fauna when you're teaching a class like this, but it isn't essential since you can look things up later. That's what good notes are for, and making the drawings as accurate as possible.

I am fascinated by the differences and similarities between adult journal pages and kid journal pages. The journaling part, of course, is more complete and introspective on adult pages, because this is what we go to school for, to learn to write and think about things. But often the art is almost exactly the same quality, child or adult. This isn't a put-down of anyone's art capabilities. What it says to me is that people, in general, completely abandon their artistic education at approximately 8-12 years of age. What a shame!

Still, with even the minimal Right-brain instruction they received in the first half of the class, my seven quasi-kid teachers were doing great, and more to the point, drawing with confidence. I have no doubt that with continuing practice they could develop their skills considerably.

Here are their journal pages ~ be sure to click on them to see them closer-up: Enjoy!

So there it is. If you'd like to download your copy of the Observing Nature Teacher's Manual and the Observing Nature Guide, along with the rights to copy it as many times as you need to provide workbooks for your students (but not to resell or share with other educators ~ that would infringe on my copyright), you can find it here. I may not have the CD available when this gets posted, so let me know if you want one.

If you have questions that aren't answered in the workbook or manual, please get in touch. I need to know if anything isn't perfectly clear.

Thanks for reading this far. I know I get wordy sometimes, but hey, that's because I'm an author, and that's my JOB.

Watercolor Pencil Workshop 8-1-09

I haven't given this workshop in a while ~ since April, actually ~ so it was fun to have a fresh run at it. It was a small class, just four students, so it was quite intimate and enjoyable.

DAY 1
Three former students attended, two of whom brought their own watercolor pencils to use. Normally I provide all the pencils, but I don't mind if students bring their own as long as they keep them separate from mine, since sorting them out at the end of the workshop could be a headache.

After a spin around the color wheel, we made a brief sortie into Right-brain contour drawing to get started on the right track. In this class, we only do a little drawing, concentrating instead on learning how to use the watercolor pencils effectively.
The class has some "coloring book" aspects, since there isn't time to do a lot of drawing AND coloring instruction in a two-day workshop. So I provide most of the drawings and they practice the techniques and processes of coloring them.

Still, it's nice to do at least some projects from start to finish. So our subjects for the contour drawings were seashells, which they later would come back to color with the watercolor pencils after gaining some experience on subjects in the workbook. Here's one of the drawings.

Students often get hung up on finding exactly the right watercolor pencil to use, so I chose their next subject to be totally boring, color-wise ~ a eucalyptus seedpod, dark brown and rather plain. I encouraged them to try mixing opposite colors from the color wheel to get different shades of brown. I also suggested adding touches of unexpected colors for interest, and they took me very literally. Click on the thumbnails here to see the larger images. They're WILD.

Another area which causes either a lot of trouble or terminally boring results is how you shade white items. Gray should be the last resort. When a white subject is near a colored one, the color reflects back onto the white subject with interesting results. You can experiment with this yourself ~ put a white object on a colored surface, and notice how the color reflects up onto the white. In the picture here, you can see the strip of colors I provide to play with these effects.

I gave them interesting white subjects to draw: when I was in Idaho in June I collected a LOT of white bones in the desert, picking them up from where they had been bleaching amidst the fragrant sagebrush plants, crystal-lined geodes and horned lizards. Here's Rachelle sketching a muledeer's jawbone.

What a great job they did on the reflections!






By the way, these were drawn with ballpoint pens, no pencil or erasing.







Then, to get back to a more genteel subject, I taught them how to make dewdrops (or raindrops, take your pick), and we finished off the day by first practicing some textures in ballpoint pen, then going back to color the seashells they had drawn earlier. They could either use the photo for color, or an actual shell from my collection. Here's what those looked like when they were finished:

Fran had to leave at noon to go to her job, so she didn't get to color bones and shells. Fortunately, she was reasonably experienced, and she was able to pick up much of what she had missed by working extra hard the second day.


DAY 2

We started out the second day with another run at the dewdrops. I always do the dewdrops twice because the first time around the results are usually not terrific, and a brush-up the next morning usually produces much nicer results.

Open your coloring books, ladies! On the second day we got into color intensively, learning how to make landscapes, ocean, and water in the first few exercises.

About this time, students who haven't used paintbrushes much before have progressed from just getting color onto the paper to trying to finesse the strokes, so I do an intensive project with a spotted orchid to work on this aspect.

This exercise also teaches a quick, easy, and very effective way to make a background which is suitable for just about any subject. The students produced some nice results, and Gayle used what she had just learned to add a dewdropwith some reflected colors, both pink and green, to her orchid. Be sure to click the orchid below left for a close-up look!

One of the returnees, Marlene, is something of a workshop junkie, and she has learned the value of taking notes during workshops. (It's amazing how much you can forget after leaving the class even with my nice workbooks to refer to later). She incorporated her notes into her journal, along with simple little sketches and paint demos to remind herself of important points.

I wanted to quickly cover fur, tree bark, and sunlight on foliage before starting our final project, so we did our Five Color Bobcat, with students selecting five different brown-orange-yellow-red colors with which to make the fur vibrant (if you watch the hair ads on TV, you'll have noticed how they hype multiple color hi-lights for beautiful hair? Same thing.)

Finally they were ready for their Final Project, for which the local market had produced lovely nectarines. They spent the last hour of class busily coloring their nectarines and practicing ways to add highlights. Don't these make you hungry?





I am proud of this bunch of students. They really rose to the occasion!

My next posting (soon, I hope) will be of the teachers workshop I did yesterday at the North Mountain Nature Center. I taught 13 teachers/volunteers/staff of the nature center how to teach the Observing Nature course, a half-day journal/sketching course for young people. I'll teach it again next week, but this was the first run and I'm happy to say it went without a snag (except that I forgot to hand out my evaluations until half of the participants had already left. A Freudian slip?)

Observing Nature With Kids July 6, 2009

July 6 dawned bright and clear, a beautiful day, not too hot, not too cool, and most importantly, not rainy. What a relief! I was scheduled to teach a workshop with 12 kids, and the weather cooperated perfectly. Our classroom was the outdoor pavilion at North Mountain Park Nature Center in Ashland, Oregon. Our sketching arena was the nature center's natural area with two ponds, Ashland Creek, a reconstruction of a Shasta Indian umma (bark-covered dwelling) and the semi-wooded flood plain along the creek. Perfect.

This was my first go at teaching kids the Observing Nature class, and although I was nervous about it, I was also relieved that I was getting the opportunity with this Reading Camp, led by Debi Blair and Max Schmeling and sponsored by the Oregon Writing Project for 4th - 8th graders. Part of a week-long event, the kids would participate with the Klamath Bird Observatory, which was banding birds during the week, among other projects. I was to start the week out for them with instructions on how to observe the natural world around them, then sketch and journal what they experienced.

Teaching the half-day class would give me valuable insight on the workbooks I had been creating for area nature centers. And since I am scheduled to teach local teachers/naturalists how to teach the course, it greatly relieved me to get first-hand experience. I had been working from detailed notes sent to me by CeCe Bowerman, at the Deer Creek Nature Center in Selma, Oregon, who had used one of the workbooks to teach a similar class, so I knew what to expect and had lots of good advice on how to effectively teach it ~ but DOING it is a whole 'nother thing.

I didn't tell Debi or Max that I hadn't taught the class yet (one Nervous Nelly was sufficient) , so they were perfectly confident that I knew what I was doing.

Miraculously, my previous experience stood me in good stead, and we were all pleased with the results ~ and the kids were prepared to sketch and journal their way through the rest of the week. They were a great bunch of youngsters, ranging in age from 10 to 13 or so. And they were all eager, responsive, and well-mannered (well, a little goofy at times, but hey, that's kids!).

I started them out with the typical Right-Brain exercises I teach in my adult classes. Age has utterly no effect on results as long as the student can understand the instructions, so their drawings looked identical to those of beginning adult students. No surprises there.

They drew oak leaves and bones, then I passed around a collection of interesting natural touchy/feely items for them to examine: fuzzy mullein leaves, prickly pine cones, cottonwood fluff, porcupine quills (poked through a file card), plaster tracks, horsetail (Equisetum) pieces ~ also called scouring rush by pioneers and miners who used them to scrub pots ~ and a number of other fascinating items. These sparked curiosity and questions, and we had a lively discussion as things passed from hand to hand.
Although they didn't draw them, this exercise centered and focused the kids, who were intrigued and interested in the various objects similar to things they might find to draw later in the session.

We worked our way quickly through the rest of the workbook, which featured good journaling examples, how to use the magnifying glass and a lid to show enlargements, and what should go on a journal page. They examined a page showing insects, spider, flower, and plant diagrams with parts labeled with their correct names, plus a page of skulls showing a squirrel, raccoon, otter, muskrat, great horned owl, deer, and woodpecker skulls, plus an owl pellet ~ all items they could conceivably find in this area. Those had parts labeled, too.

Finally, we reviewed the Question Page, listing questions they could ask themselves about a subject to help get them started on their journaling: "what ate part of this plant?" "what is this insect doing?," etc.

Now they were ready to cruise. We handed out a magnifying glass and a 1½" plastic lid to each student (the lid was to make a circle into which they would draw a magnification they observed), and made sure they had pencils. Students from Ashland High School had come to help and to supervise groups of students in order to earn community service credits, and Max took a group as well. Each group went off to find a spot to settle down in and observe, sketch and journal.

At this point, I tidied up the mess and put away my natural history items, then went out from group to group to visit each student at work, making suggestions, reminding them of their objectives, helping them identify what they were looking at, and sharpening pencils. I was excited to see how they threw themselves into the exercise, sketching and drawing intently.

One group was lucky enough to spot a blacktail doe leading a new fawn past them. The same group also observed a gray fox trotting down the trail with prey in its mouth (there is some dispute as to whether it was a bird or a piece of red meat). You can read about it on their journal pages.

The sketching sessions were each 20 minutes long. Between the first two sessions, Debi, who had sketched along with them, talked for a couple of minutes about ways to observe and and journal. We broke for snacks after the second session, after we had admired all the artwork and journaling. Some of the students read their journal entries out loud for us. The kids were really courteous during the readings and the show & tell ~ I didn't hear a single unkind remark about drawings or writing. For the third sketching session, Max and Debi and I decided to send them out to draw a "mystery item," writing 3 or more clues to help others identify their subject later.

I photographed the journals after the final session, but I may have missed a few because parents picked up their kids punctually and may have made off with some of them before I had a chance to take a picture. Debi got me permission slips from all the parents for photographing their kids and their journal pages.

Max and Debi and I debriefed after they'd all gone. That's when I told them I hadn't taught the course before, and to my gratification they claimed they thought I'd done it many times previously. Very nice people to work with! We discussed improvements that might be made, and a few surfaced: the magnifying glasses should be on strings which the students would hang around their necks ~ one of the plastic lenses got badly scratched, and I had seen one being fished out from under a boardwalk.

And I decided the supervisors should have a checklist of things to help students with (what should go on each journal page; don't forget the magnification; put name, date and location up in the corner, etc.), so they could be a positive influence rather than simply herding the kids to and fro. They had done a great job, everything we asked of them, but I think they would have enjoyed a more active part. Still, all in all, it was a resounding success. Thanks Debi and Max!!!

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I'll be teaching teachers to teach this class in two or more workshops in August (see my workshop website). I've now incorporated all I learned in teaching it myself into their workshop workbook (that's its cover above), and include lists of things they might use as nature items to focus their classes; ways to present them; equipment they'll need; resources for finding supplies; course objectives; a guide and checklist for the supervisors; a simple, oral evaluation sheet to run past their students; a permission slip template to get permissions for photographing the students and their work for use in newsletters, and much more.

I'll be teaching ~ elementary teachers, nature center volunteers, high school teachers, and whoever else is interested ~ the half-day Nature Observation class just as I presented it to the students. They'll be asked to complete all the exercises, including going out to sketch, just as the kids do. This will give them valuable insight on how they can teach their own classes. But they'll go out for only one sketching session since we'll spend the rest of the session going over techniques, exchanging insights and suggestions, and discussing the course objectives, managing supervisors, the evaluation, etc. I'm really looking forward to this.

And now, here are the journal pages of life along Ashland Creek, as observed and recorded July 6, 2009, by twelve naturalist/students.





























And finally, the page Debi sketched alongside the students. It was in doing this page that she noticed tiny, remarkable egg cases on the underside of the leaf, which prompted her to suggest to the students that they watch for their own small miracles.

As they say, "a good time [obviously!] was had by all."