Welcome to this site, Evolving Beauty, a place for enjoyable learning about the wondrous Earth Community. Here, we try to feature projects for children (aged 3 to 12 approx.) that blend art with science so that learning about the world of nature can be integrated harmoniously with the marvelous human capacities for empathy, creation, movement, and understanding. Our goal is to sustain youngsters’ access to their inborn potentials of heart, hands, and head even as they are becoming better acquainted with the best science regarding life on the planet. We are striving to enhance young people’s abilities to devise ingenious, well-informed, and socially beneficial responses to the many challenges of our times.
At this location, you’ll find Activities, Games, and Art Projects designed to accompany children’s explorations of the natural world here in the forestlands of the Northeastern United States. At this point (April, 2026), we continue to upload projects to the website. Eventually, we hope that you’ll find quite an assortment here. Some will engage broad topics such as energy flow, cycles, evolution, biodiversity, systems, or competition and cooperation within and among species. Others are more closely focused around particular species, including human interactions within this realm – especially, organic farming and gardening (at home or at school), and the Native American heritage of this Lower Merrimack River Valley region. All are presented in formats that attempt to honor and encourage the prosocial, affiliative intuitions of secure young people, their zest for life, their quest for wisdom, their creative imaginations, their physical. social, emotional and executive functioning skills, and their willingness to contribute uniquely and joyfully towards the common good.
Special Announcement: The print version of my illustrated activity collection Circling the Sun, Racing the Wind is now available. It was published by Green Writers Press of Vermont in November of 2024. For more information, please follow this link: https://greenwriterspress.com/book/circling-the-sun-racing-the-wind/
Update: The last remaining copies of the first printing can be purchased here. https://www.ipgbook.com/circling-the-sun–racing-the-wind-products-9798987070789.php A second printing is now underway.
Last months to fully access the Natural Start Alliance’s “Rooted and Resilient Online Conference:” Among the offerings available at the conference website (listed below), you’ll find my abundantly illustrated, on-demand, hour-long webinar. That webinar focuses on specific games and art projects (most of which are also included in the book Circling the Sun and Racing the Wind). Recordings from this wide-ranging conference (including this particular webinar) are available to registrants from July 14, 2025 – July 14, 2026). In my presentation, Reimagining Traditional Games for Deeper Ecological Understanding, Connection, and Fun, viewers are invited to consider a rationale for teaching ecological principles, values, and consciousness by way of active, arts-infused, outdoor games and projects – many drawn from N. American and W. European children’s games. One of my main goals in this endeavor is to inspire the teaching of ecological principles and place-based natural histories not merely by ‘factual’ verbal description, observation, and experiment, but also, especially for young children, by means of varied art forms: creative dramatics, visual art making, music, poetry, dance, and enjoyable, child-directed, imaginative games. My point is that ecological knowledge and understandings should be passed along in engaging, non-aversive, ARTFUL ways. So much learning can be pleasantly and effectively transmitted when the content is linked and presented in conjunction with the values and skills associated with art-making and receiving. In this way, scientific understandings become more seamlessly woven into a context of creative agency, prosociality, and psychological empowerment. Youngsters’ most life-affirming human impulses and intuitions are reinforced by the messages and the methods of the teaching and learning. A related goal of both the webinar and the book, Circling the Sun, Racing the Wind, is to encourage teachers (and students) to design their own games and this webinar might help catalyze your own work in this regard.
The Natural Start Alliance is the institutional organizer of this online conference. It is also the Early Learning branch of the North American Environmental Educators Association (NAEEA). For more information and registration options, just follow this link: https://conference.naturalstart.org