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Naturalist Intelligence
Unearthing Learning
If you told your child it was all happening at the zoo, would he believe you—and drag you there? Can your daughter remember the names of enough dinosaurs to be a consultant on the next Jurassic Park movie? Do you have a vegetable gardener or an ant farmer in the house? If so, chances are your child has a highly developed Naturalist Intelligence.
The eighth and latest Intelligence to be added to Howard Gardner's list, the Naturalist Intelligence represents the ability to understand, identify, and work with plants, animals and other natural objects. This is the intelligence of the farmer or horticulturist, the veterinarian, the botanist, the environmentalist and the marine biologist.
According to Gardner, "this ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef. I also speculate that much of our consumer society exploits the natural intelligences, which can be mobilized in the discrimination among cars, sneakers, kinds of makeup, and the like."
Of course, you don't have to be a naturalist or a scientist to nurture your child's Naturalist Intelligence. Maggie Meyer, co-author of Discovering the Naturalist Intelligence: Developing Science Skills Through Adventures in the Schoolyard (Zephyr Press, 1998), developed an exercise called A Quick Quadrat for the classroom, and it can work just as well in your backyard. All you really need is 40 inches of string.
Show your child how to tie the ends of the string together and form it into a square. Explain that this is a quadrat, which is used by scientists collecting data and observing the area around it. Have your child choose a place outside—even the sidewalk in front of your house—to set it up. Take a notebook and pencil along, and have your child write down everything she found in her quadrat. She can record rocks, bugs, plants, seeds—anything at all.
Afterward, your child might draw a map of the area in his quadrat, or create a catalog of the objects he found there. He could choose one object he recorded and write a story about how it came to be in his quadrat. He could also choose one object for in-depth study, unearthing a passion for plants, rocks or insects.
"Kids who have a naturalist's bent come alive when involved with experiences in the great outdoors," says Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., in his latest book, In Their Own Way: Discovering and encouraging your child's multiple intelligences (Putnam, 2000). "To help them in their research, provide them with naturalist's tools, like a set of binoculars, a magnifying glass, goggles for underwater exploration, or a hiking pack for collecting samples during a trek." Armstrong suggests that families can also watch nature programs together, keep pets (even something as small as an ant farm), and visit natural history museums, zoos and other places where wild things live.
Kinds of Multiple Intelligences
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