These activities are designed to be used right outside your door! Learn about and explore socio-ecological systems in your neighborhood by taking wondering walks, making observations, asking “Should We” questions, modeling data and relationships, conducting investigations, analyzing data and offering explanations, making new decisions and sharing with other families and friends. Each activity is explained in an overview document and then you can use the activity sheet to participate in the activity. If you don’t have a printer, no worries! You can easily remake the activity sheets on a blank piece of paper! Photograph parts of your activities and post them to the Learning in Places Instagram page if you are inspired to share what you are learning in your neighborhood!



Child walking through a field in the sun

LE 1.A Sharing Places: Neighborhood Walk



Children at a lake

LE 1.B Family Learning Across Places



LE 1.C Taking a Socio-Ecological Histories of Places Walk



Adult and child taking a picture of a crab

LE 1.D What is the current season?



Close of a plant and a child's hand pointing to the earth

LE 1.E Why is this season important to our family?



Three small children crouch to inspect an item in the muddy earth

LE 2.A Preparing for the Outdoors



LE 2.B Family Wondering Walk



LE 3.A Taking a Focused Walk Together: Species, Kinds, and Behaviors



LE 3.B Taking a Focused Walk Together: Relationships



LE 3.C Taking a Focused Walk Together: Places, Lands, and Waters



LE 3.D Taking a Focused Walk Together: Human Decision Making



LE 3.E Taking a Focused Walk Together: Thinking Across Scales



Nurse Log

LE 4.A Choosing a Phenomenon to Observe



LE 4.B Observing & Comparing Phenomena



LE 5.A What “Should We” Do? Exploring your family’s daily decisions



LE 5.B What “Should We” Do? Making nature-culture relations over time.



LE 5.C Creating a Neighborhood “Should We” Question



LE 6.A Observing and Modeling Specific Relationships



LE 6.B “Should We” Questions, Models, and Preparing to Investigate!



LE 7 Planning Field-Based Investigations and Collecting Data



LE 8 Summarizing and Visualizing Data from your Field-based Investigations



LE 9.A Returning Back to Our “Should We” Questions



LE 9.B Returning Back to Your Initial Models to Ask More Questions



LE 10.A Making decisions around our “Should We” questions



LE 10.B Making & Sharing Our Ethical Decisions