"The second edition supports a stronger awareness of Indigenous approaches to environmental learning. It offers an encounter with Indigenous perspectives that challenge us to think in very differnet ways about our place in the world. The Indigenous lens in the edition provides a starting point in a conversation that opens educators' eyes to Indigenous perspectives as their students build lasting connections with the natural world." --back cover.

Parrots and lorikeets swoop down, vivid, bright and colourful. Black swans glide through the air. Owls stare out from pages, wide-eyed. A sense of awe swept through natural history circles in eighteenth-century London when the first ships returned from Sydney with their cargo of exotic animals, birds and plants – and striking watercolour illustrations. The sudden emergence, in 2011, of a large number of these watercolour illustrations has revealed much about the early years of the colony. In Natural Curiosity, Louise Anemaat uncovers never-before-published works from the artists of the First Fleet, including convicts-turned-watercolourists Thomas Watling and John Doody, and the anonymous 'Port Jackson Painter'. She unravels the complex network of natural history collectors who spanned the globe – eagerly acquiring, copying and exchanging these artworks – from New South Wales Surgeon-General John White to passionate British collector Aylmer Bourke Lambert.

Natural Curiosity is a warm and contemplative insight into one family's experience of moving from mainstream schooling to home education, and learning through the lens of nature and natural history. Since becoming 'unschooled', the two children have thrived on a diet of self-directed play and learning, amassing life skills, confidence, responsibility, and a vast array of knowledge along the way. This thoughtful book touches upon important themes in education and environmentalism, such as children's rights in schooling, the use and place of technology in learning, and the absence of the natural world in mainstream education. It gives a considered, balanced view of home schooling, interspersed with entertaining tales including constructing life-sized mammoth skeletons and living for a day as historically accurate Vikings. It offers an understanding of how this type of education works and what inspires the choice to pursue it.

2011 National Outdoor Book Award for Nature Guidebook Are you ready for a black fly bite to get graphic, for a barred owl's call to take on new meaning, and for the life cycle of the eastern newt to suddenly seem complex, beautiful, and intricately bound to the subtle patterns of mysterious underwater landscapes and damp forest floors? Naturalist Mary Holland's new book Naturally Curious promises a walk in the woods will never be the same. Holland leads you through the New England seasons out-of-doors—through the sun, rain, and snow; along roadsides and wetlands; above underground burrows and under treetop nesting sites. With just a turn of the page you'll suddenly know more about the creatures that frequent your backyard or the pond you visit every summer than you ever thought possible. Naturally Curious perfectly melds practical field guide with informal nature literature, providing you the remarkable opportunity to sit back, relax, and learn something fascinating about the natural world around you.

Developing Natural Curiosity through Project-Based Learning is a practical guide that provides step-by-step instructions for PreK–3 teachers interested in embedding project-based learning (PBL) into their daily classroom routine. The book spells out the five steps teachers can use to create authentic PBL challenges for their learners and illustrates exactly what that looks like in an early childhood classroom. Authentic project-based learning experiences engage children in the mastery of twenty-first-century skills and state standards to empower them as learners, making an understanding of PBL vital for PreK–3 teachers everywhere.

With her debut monograph, artist and painter Anna Valdez takes viewers into her lush, plant filled studio for an intimate look into her artistic practice and personal life. Her paintings are mainly autobiographical, documenting the ongoing nature of and in her studio accentuated with nods to art history, botany, sexuality and still life painting. This comprehensive coffee table book features an extensive catalog of the artist's work to date accompanied by an eclectic look at the many facets of the artist's personal life that inform and influence her work.

Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Parrish shows how scientific knowledge about America, rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic. Delving into an understudied archive of letters, Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race persisted within the natural history community, the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe. Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the Transcendentalists, American Curiosity also enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.