A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons

A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons

by Rick Van Noy
A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons

A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons

by Rick Van Noy

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Overview

The technology boom of recent years has given kids numerous reasons to stay inside and play, while parents' increasing safety concerns make it tempting to keep children close to home. But what is being lost as fewer kids spend their free time outdoors? Deprived of meaningful contact with nature, children often fail to develop a significant relationship with the natural world, much less a sense of reverence and respect for the world outside their doors.

A Natural Sense of Wonder is one father's attempt to seek alternatives to the "flickering waves of TV and the electrifying boing of video games" and get kids outside and into nature. In the spirit of Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder, Rick Van Noy journeys out of his suburban home with his children and describes the pleasures of walking in a creek, digging for salamanders, and learning to appreciate vultures. Through these and other "walks to school," the Van Noys discover what lives nearby, what nature has to teach, and why this matters.

From the backyard to the hiking trail, in a tide pool and a tree house, in the wild and in town, these narrative essays explore the terrain of childhood threatened by the lure of computers and television, by fear and the loss of play habitat, showing how kids thrive in their special places. In chronicling one parent's determination (and at times frustration) to get his kids outside, A Natural Sense of Wonder suggests ways kids both young and old can experience the wonder found only in the natural world.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780820338606
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication date: 09/15/2010
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 152
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

RICK VAN NOY is a professor of English at Radford University. He is the author of Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place, A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons (Georgia), and Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (Georgia).

Table of Contents


Prologue     ix
Walking to School     1
The Places I've Lived, and the Ones I Live For     9
Beautiful Scavengers     17
Scorched Earth     27
Nordic Fun     36
Skating Pond     40
Weed Eaters     44
Creek Walking     55
Holy Land     62
Bridge 33     74
Field Guides     81
Swimming Hole     92
False Cape     104
Tree House     113
Seven Days     122
Tide Pools     128
Dirt World     140
Notes     151
Acknowledgments     163
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