Description
Coyote Excites. Mentor Guides. Nature Teaches.
Wilderness Awareness School’s Ellen Haas co-authored with Jon Young and Evan McGown Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature, a complete manual for the outdoor mentoring approach taught at Wilderness Awareness School. It was a sparkling success and has spread worldwide among committed nature educators.
Coyote’s Pocket Guide to Connecting Kids with Nature
They’ve simplified the big book, shifted things up and boiled them down to make it easy for all kinds of families, teachers, and outdoor guides in every situation to take kids outside to play and learn.
This little book coaches adults in charge of kids to take on the role of Coyote—playful, curious, adventurous—and of Mentor—directing wisely from behind. It describes thirteen core routines for connecting with nature and lays out a serial flow of things you could do on any outing, whether a daily dog walk, a homeschool adventure, or a classroom field trip. It provides tips on managing programs and includes an inspiring section on how brains function while thinking like wildlife in the dynamic weather and uneven ground of the great outdoors.
Curious Coyote
With its flashing bright pages, big print, and photos that tell stories, this sidekick to the pocket guide overflows with prompts, cues, questions, and errands to jumpstart kids into being alert, active, and focused outdoors. It shows grownups HOW to ask perky questions, present doable challenges, and call forth kids’ stories and wonders. You can practice on yourself!
Curious Coyote features:
- Magical Senses: awakening sensory awareness
- Being Wild: charades and imitations
- Find: scavenger hunts
- Journaling: writing and sketching
- Thrival: survival challenges
- Sit Spot: still, quiet and alone in activities
- Stories: sharing experiences and feelings
- What I Love: expressing gratitude
These guides invite you to circle up, adapt your gathering to a flowing framework, and choose activities that work for your people and your place.
About the Authors
Ellen Haas Loved Coyote Mentoring the moment she met it in 1994–because it was just how she’d been teaching in English classrooms—but better because its classroom was navigating nature’s uneven ground. She and Jon Young and Evan McGown entangled their roots and conspired for many years to wrestle the Art of Mentoring practice into print by writing Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature. Ellen helped cultivate Wilderness Awareness School and she serves still as blunt and spirited Elder.
Lexie Bakewell is a lifelong curious naturalist who homeschooled her children all the way up. She thrives on poking around outdoors then combing through field guides to know more about who she met. Her background in field biology and science education makes everything interesting. Her grownup homeschooled daughter, Mackenzie Bakewell, needs big credit for bringing us to birth. Her business, ZieBee Media, is our publisher and genuine fan.
Ellen and Lexie wrote these books because they recognize the powerful value of the Coyote Mentoring approach and want to promote and advance it. Their vision is that every child everywhere gets access to the experience of deep kinship with wild nature. With this pocket guide, they throw a pebble in the pond hoping it will fan out in ripples of ever-widening Coyote programs.