Make Your Own Field Guide
Looking for a way to turn your nature journaling into something you can share with the community? Consider making a field guide for a nearby nature area!
- Choose your focus. Where are your geographic limits? Are you focusing on native plants or introduced species? Are you looking at plants, fungi, animals, and/or insects? Try to narrow it down until the project feels achievable.
- Begin exploring your focus with nature journal pages. You don’t need to worry about formatting at this point, this is just to test out your idea. What do you find most interesting about what you’re noticing?
- Note: Your guide doesn’t have to be “complete” to be useful! It can be a guide to just a few species… or even just a lot of information about one thing, especially if you follow it through the seasons or through a full growth cycle (from seed to flower to seed).
- Do some research, and experiment with different ways to add what you’ve learned to your nature journal pages.
- Optional: consider using a consistent way to show data that occurs across all your pages. Check out Gargi Chugh’s website for inspiration.
- Start to decide on a format for the pages of your guide. Vertical or horizontal? What do you want on every page? Where is your artwork, your writing, and your data? Try out a few different ways of organizing your page.
- Consider how you want to share your work. If you are hoping to make it into a published book (see below), you’ll have to be able to scan your pages, so you will need to make them on loose sheets or in a sketchbook that will lay flat on a scanner (or lay flat for you to photograph).
- Begin the work of making your pages. You can either focus on working on one page at a time, from sketch to a finished product with color, or sketch out lots of pages, then add detail over time.
- If you’d like to be able to share it with others, begin photographing or scanning your pages.
- Print option: There are a number of online services, like lulu.com, that allow you to upload a pdf file to make a printed book. Here’s a blog post I found that describes the process in more detail.
- Online option: Upload your pages to either a free service like Canva, Google docs or slides, or create a website. You can also create a pdf with all of your images using a program like Microsoft Word.
- Share it with friends, neighbors, and on social media (including Wonderland)
- Consider celebrating your accomplishment with a picnic!
Need inspiration? Check out Kate Rutter’s new book, Bay Area Botanical.
In the Classroom
Lesson plan from Wild Wonder Foundation: https://www.wildwonder.org/activity-collection-or-field-guide
Example field guide instructions for students: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gnnc69I2UUEuMb9XZGgXsQLD7PN3G9OD9RoRt-lMlm4/edit?usp=sharing (note: to make edits for use in your own classroom, go to “File” and then “Make a Copy”. Save the copy on your drive, and then you can edit your new copy to match your needs.)
Lesson plan for an in-depth plant research project with a grading rubric: https://oneschoolonefarm.com/for-teachers/ (scroll down near the bottom for “Plant Research and Ecological Design“)
Video from the NJEF with teacher Rachael Robbins discussing how she used field guides in her classroom:
