Imagination, Personal Connection, Challenge, Spontaneity

Land and wildlife conservation is most effective when it is accessible to everyone.

Schools are great places to offer environmental education, because they are a part of most children’s lives.

Environmental education should be part of children’s everyday lives and should take place within schools and on publically accessible land that children can visit again and again with their families – this encourages thinking about nature as a part of normal life rather than an exotic destination

Integrate programs with the classroom curriculum – Kestrel naturalists teach the same academic topics the students are studying in the classroom, using the natural world near the school as the tangible model for learning

Connecting classroom curricula with local ecology will boost student academic achievement

Close up experiences with local wildlife will inspire children to respect nature and to go out into the woods and explore

All environmental education should encourage children to spend more time outside

Children should understand that nature is about them. To this end, we involve student’s creative ideas, personal interests, and stories in our programs

Activities should be challenging, allowing students to engage their minds in learning

Environmental education should be flexible, dynamic, and fully participatory, never rehearsed or “canned.” Our programs are different every time we run them.

While it is important to encourage conservation action, we must first build a relationship between people and nature. It is more important to build naturalist skills and love for the outdoors in young children than to teach them to take specific conservation action.