Last week, we hosted 23 people, children and adults from local Camp Featherfoot for a day of reverence-building activities. Our summer intern, Emily Peake, introduced the group to such activities as Wonder Walk, Find Your Tree, Smell Teas, Seton Watching, and Gnome House Building and Ecology Discussion.
Watching the children share their love of these experiences and respond to these activities that awakened their senses with such joy and pleasure was a treat for us at IHE. We spend most of our working hours training others to be humane educators and advancing the field of humane education, so days when we get to share our beautiful space with children and watch their hearts and minds open to caring for the environment is a gift and a reminder of the power of this form of education.
Humane education is good for kids, good for society, good for animals, and good for the Earth. We hope you’ll introduce people to these wonderful activities in your community too!
Zoe Weil
Author of Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times, Most Good, Least Harm, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Images courtesy of Daniel DeLuca.
Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Filed under: Environmental Preservation, Institute for Humane Education, humane education, nature, reverence | Tagged: humane education, reverence, nature, natural world, environmental education, activities, lesson plans, camps | Leave a Comment »


The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs
So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals
“Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.”
On September 6, the Institute for Humane Education (IHE) will be offering its acclaimed course:
In a
On July 17, I was inducted into the
Last year I was doing a book tour for Most Good, Least Harm in the mid-Atlantic states, and I was invited to do a presentation in New Jersey at the home of a wonderful activist who invited the community into her living room to hear me speak and put me up in her lovely guest room. One of the attendees was Terri Warm. Terri’s name fit her perfectly. She was one of the kindest, warmest people I’d ever met.
In a previous blog post I wrote about spending my birthday hiking 13 miles over 9 peaks in Acadia National Park. What I didn’t mention was that we had heard that the Obamas, scheduled to be in Acadia the weekend of July 16th, had actually come several days earlier and were already in the park. Since we were spending the day climbing most of the mountains in Acadia, we thought there actually might be a chance we’d run into them. We joked all day about it, calling “Barack! Barack! Where are you?” and asking people we met on the trails if they’d seen the Obamas yet.
For 8 1/2 years, the
After a day of meetings and before one more evening meeting, I scooted out after dinner to kayak at low tide. The sun was setting and the clouds were pink in the western sky. The loons were making their eerie calls. I slid my kayak into the ocean and slowly paddled, staring into the shallow water to watch the drama unfolding below me. Crabs were battling, frilly worms were swaying like anemones, fish were schooling around me, tiny sea stars were clinging to little rocks and giant sea stars to big ones. Seals were bobbing their heads to look at me as I looked at them, both of us curious.
I recently turned 49. It felt like a big birthday, 7 cycles of 7, last of the 40s and all that. When I was a kid, I was a gymnast. Then at 13 I started experiencing severe back pain, and I was diagnosed with all sorts of problems that would plague me for 30 years. And then, shortly after my back no longer really bothered me, I began dealing with incapacitating sciatica that morphed into bearable but challenging sciatica for a couple of years. For an athletic person who practices Aikido and dances, recurring and debilitating pain that prevents movement has been especially frustrating.

