The Powerful Benefits of Nature Journaling
Bringing students outdoors to draw and take note of natural surroundings creates space for curiosity—while encouraging deeper comprehension.
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Go to My Saved Content.Regularly making space for students to interact with their natural surroundings through nature journaling—sketching, annotating, and slowing down to observe the seemingly ordinary bits of nature close by—can have benefits for a student’s social and emotional well-being as well as their scientific comprehension.
Today, young students most commonly learn about the parts and processes of the natural world by rote, memorizing concepts from a textbook, which does little to inspire wonder and curiosity. But encouraging students to go outdoors and take notice of the tiniest flowers in the grass and other bits of nature that usually go overlooked, on the other hand, soothes stress and sparks interest while still engaging them in rigorous, purposeful academic work.
Sketching and writing reflections about natural phenomena also builds crucial cognitive and processing skills like close observation, technical illustration, attention to detail, critical thinking, and the ability to organize and categorize information. When drawing and writing in a journal, students process information in multiple ways, leading to deeper comprehension and more durable memories.
To learn more about the research cited in this video, check out the resources below.
- Darja Skribe Dimec and Jelka Strgar’s research on scientific conceptions in elementary school (2017)
- Jennifer Bollich’s research article about the impacts of nature journaling in high school classrooms (2023)
- MaryCarol R. Hunter, Brenda W. Gillespie, and Sophie Yu-Pu Chen’s study on how urban nature experiences reduce stress in students (2019)
- Myra A. Fernandes, Jeffrey D. Wammes, and Melissa E. Meade’s research article exploring the surprisingly powerful influence of drawing on memory (2018)
- Kylie A. Dankiw, Margarita D. Tsiros, Katherine L. Baldock, and Saravana Kumar’s systematic review of the impacts of unstructured nature play on health in early childhood development (2020)
To dig deeper into the benefits of nature journaling, read Youki Terada’s article for Edutopia, “Why Kids Should Nature Journal at All Grade Levels.”