Scouting for Wild Ones {Curriculum Review}
I’m so excited for this! Scouting for Wild Ones is the curriculum we’ll be working through with our homeschool nature co-op this year. Our group of six families has met weekly, year round, outdoors, for the past 2 years (with a few breaks, of course!). It’s hard to put into a blog post how important this group has been to both the kids and the parents who have been involved (and really very simple to implement). Allowing kids time to explore in nature, with a little bit of gentle guidance and lot of consistency, has reaped such a rich harvest. After following the Exploring Nature With Children curriculum with the group for 2 years, and with my own kids for 3 years prior, we were ready for something different this year.
Enter Scouting for Wild Ones! I’ll be updating as we make our way through the curriculum, but today I’m sharing my initial thoughts and how we are planning for the fall term.
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The curriculum consists of 12 units:
- observation
- stalking
- tracking
- hiking skills
- compass work
- using a map
- knot tying
- fire building
- making camp
- night sky
- weather predictions
- signaling
Each unit is made up of lessons that are short, scripted, and include a group activity; additional “challenge activities” are included with each lesson which can extend the learning and be used at home during the week.
I love that the lesson activities are simple and (usually) don’t require many materials or set up. In our co-op, we have a varied group of kids, from younger, less “outdoorsy” to those who have more experience with hiking, nature identification, survival skills, and the like– from kindergarteners up through upper elementary grades. The lessons in Scouting for Wild Ones look easy to scaffold down to the younger ones while keeping the olders challenged.
Another aspect of the curriculum that my kids are pumped for are the badges! My homeschooled kids have very little experience with “tests” and actually really love them (see our geography tests!). At the conclusion of each unit, the scouts are encouraged to complete activities that demonstrate their learning. To celebrate, they earn a badge. I found some awesome badges and banners to iron them onto on Amazon. The book publisher also offers stickers as an option. (For whatever reason my kids have never been into stickers. They look at the Trader Joe’s cashiers like they’re crazy to think they’d WANT them?! lol)
For the fall term, we will be working our way through the first two units: observation and stalking. Observation skills are at the heart of this curriculum, as this trains the children to notice, “and then to marvel at the world around them. From this reverence grows the attributes of a scout ” (pg 9). This is taught through direct lessons about using our senses to discern clues about the environment, and lots of activities to flesh this out.
For our co-op, each of the parents will take a week leading the lesson using the book. Those with less teaching experience have a scripted lesson they can lean on, with activities prepared. With our size co-op, it’s so nice to have the consistency of the group but just to have the responsibility of teaching once every 6 weeks.
You can find a lenghty sample of the book here, which includes lesson and activity examples as well as badge test excerpts. The entire book is 170 pages long and I expect it will take at least a year to complete at our pace.
You can find a Charlotte Mason Show podcast interview with the curriculum’s creator here.
“It is our hope that working through this course will instill in the children a love for the world around them along with a sense of duty to both serve others and to steward the Earth and all living things that call it home.”
Follow along with our journey this year on my Instagram account! If you have any questions about the curriculum or how we run our co-op, feel free to reach out!
