Teaching Kids About Native Plants, Hunting and Foraging

Learn the importance of teaching kids about native plants, hunting and foraging when they are growing up. They'll get practical skills, confidence, and an ability to preserve a heritage that is quickly becoming forgotten.

By Jenny Underwood
Updated on August 11, 2022
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by AdobeStock/Jacob Lund

Learn the importance of teaching kids about native plants, hunting and foraging when they are growing up. They’ll get practical skills, confidence, and an ability to preserve a heritage that is quickly becoming forgotten.

Our world has never introduced more technology into our individual lives, offering our children so many roadblocks to natural learning. That’s why it’s so important that parents make a concentrated effort to train our children in almost-forgotten skills of plant identification, foraging and harvesting wild game.

Not only do traditional skills provide learning that cannot be attained elsewhere, but they also provide a level of self-sufficiency that too many people lack in our modern U.S. culture.  So how do you go about skilling up your children?

Make the Outdoors and Plant Identification Part of Daily Life

First off, it’s important to make the wild outdoors a regular part of your life. We homeschool and it’s just an accepted part of our routine that a huge portion of the day will be spent outside. While some of it might be semi-structured, most of the outdoors-related learning is integrated into daily life.

For example, when my children are playing beneath a tree, we always tell them the tree species. After doing this multiple times, they memorize it and I overhear the older ones telling the younger siblings what kind of tree that is. As we walk through the woods on a nature hike in the mornings, I might quiz them on the trees we pass. It’s not an intensive “test”; just a fun addition to our walk.

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