The Wildcraft Wonder Cabinet

Ideas and inspiration for growing creative, curious and caring kids who feel at home in nature.

Welcome to the first edition of our blog , "The Wildcraft Wonder Cabinet." Each month  we'll be sharing what we're learning about art and creativity, how nature helps us thrive, and growing compassionate and resilient kids. Our first edition explores CURIOSITY--one of the core values of Camp Wildcraft. We invite you to add to the comments; we're curious to hear about what you are  discovering  as well!  

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Wonder, Curiosity & The Need to Collect...
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Think about a time you found a mysterious seed pod or a  feather as you hiked a  trail or found a smooth shard of sea glass or a prized shell while carefully scanning the wet sand on the beach.  

​What drives the desire to find and collect surprising, unusual or everyday wonders  is a  heightened sense of curiosity, strong observation skills  and a love of the hunt! Benny, our Camp Wildcraft Co-Founder,  has a good eye for finding all things weird and wonderful--from fossils and feathers, to wire and metal objects, rescued from the road, after being twisted into random and amusing pattens by the tires of passing traffic! 

The impulse to seek, collect, categorize and display unique artifacts, or ordinary wonders, has compelled  us humans since ancient times. Cultures  around the world  have long collected and displayed sacred objects in shrines and alters to mark a holy or sacred place.  During the Age of Exploration from the 1400's  to 1600s, Europeans started traveling the world and brought back natural and cultural wonders: fossils and skeletons, plants and shells, that they considered unusual, rare and wondrous. These travelers built Cabinets of Curiosities, or Wonder Rooms, in essence, shrines to nature,  that are considered  our  our earliest   museums. 

Wonder and curiosity are similar, both focus our attention and enliven our existence. But curiosity is a shade different than wonder as it leads us to action – towards a next step to discover more. Indeed most educators believe that real learning begins with curiosity as this fuels motivation to know more, understand, and make connections. 

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So how might we encourage greater curiosity in our kids (and ourselves!)? Here are some approaches  to experiment with: 

• Encourage kids to ask questions, but don't be so quick to answer them. Challenge them to find their own answers, in books, on line, asking people who might know, or through experiments. 
• Create new conversational traditions around the breakfast and dinner table.  Ask each other what you are/were curious about today-- and what you discovered, what you still need to find out-- and how you plan to do it. 
• Encourage inquisitiveness about strangers--look at the driver or  passengers in the car next to you and ask "what do you think their life is about? Take advantage of any comfortable opportunity to talk with people you don't know. Find ways to learn about and connect with people whose culture is different than your own.
• Create lots of space for unstructured play and tinkering. Play fuels curiosity which in turn fuels creativity,  enabling  us to make surprising connections and fuel deeper learning and understanding. 
• Don't be so quick to throw out your kids' stuff--help them create spaces to collect, curate, arrange and physically ponder relationships between objects they find and create. 
• Model curiosity for your children--let them see that you never stop exploring and learning. Talk about things that you are intrigued by and what you discovered. 
• Get outside your comfort zone! Each week try something new, go on a field trip, explore a new part of the city, visit a museum, learn a new skill, cook different foods together, embrace unpredictability and surprise. 
• Encourage your kids to make a Wonder Cabinet. Suggestions below. But don't do it for them, just give them a nudge and let them build new skills and follow their own curiosity.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious,”  Albert Einstein 

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Create Your Own Wonder Cabinet!

• Create a space in the house or yard where your collection can be arranged, exhibited, shared and talked about.
• Be creative and recycle. Consider: an old shelf, fishing tackle box, pizza box, embellished shoe box, rows of recycled jars or plastic containers, plastic ziplock bags tacked to a cork board.
• Collect things that surprise, inspire, and interest you.  Use all your five senses to notice the wonder in everyday things, the patterns in nature, unusual  objects found along the way. 
• Check out the book Cabinet of Curiosities by Gordon Grice. This inspiring and instructive  book for kids includes lots of ideas on how to make your own. 
•  Visit great local collections: Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park, The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City (kids 8 and up), the The Fowler Museum of Global Art at Culture at UCLA for starters. 

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A Gallery of Wonder Boxes, Discoveries & Collections
 from Camp Wildcraft 

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"Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder and spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals
the​ human spirit."   e.e. cummings

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