Field Trips

Nature Writing

Grade Level:
High School: Ninth Grade through Twelfth Grade
Subject:
Literacy and Language Arts,Science
Common Core Standards:
9-10.L.1, 9-10.L.1.b, 9-10.L.2, 9-10.L.2.c, 9-10.L.3, 9-10.L.5, 9-10.L.5.a, 11-12.L.1, 11-12.L.1.a, 11-12.L.2, 11-12.L.2.b, 11-12.L.3, 11-12.L.3.a, 11-12.L.5, 11-12.L.5.a, 9-10.RI.2, 9-10.RI.3, 11-12.RI.5, 11-12.RI.6, 11-12.RL.3, 9-10.W.2.c, 9-10.W.3, 9-10.W.3.b, 9-10.W.3.d, 9-10.W.4, 11-12.W.1.c, 11-12.W.2.c, 11-12.W.3, 11-12.W.3.b, 11-12.W.3.c
State Standards:
English-Language Arts: MD - SL1.c; RL.11-12.5; RI.9-10.6; RI.11-12.6; W.9-12.1; VA - 9.RL.2.B; 11.RL.2.B; 9.W.1.C; 10.W.1.D; 12.W.1.C; 10.RL.2.C; 11.W.1.D

Science: VA - ENV.2.a; ENV.4.a

Feature Description - Lesson Overview

This is a self-facilitated field trip at the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park. In this program, students will take a nature walk in the C&O Canal NHP, observing elements of nature along the way. Students will then read examples of nature writing in literature and use what they’ve experienced to inspire their own writing. This 90 to 120-minute program is designed to be appropriate for high school students and done in all seasons. Word or PDF versions of this lesson plan and the Nature Observation Worksheet can be requested by emailing cocanaleducation@nps.gov.

Essential Questions

  • What biotic and abiotic features are present in the C&O Canal NHP?

  • What are characteistics of nature writing?

  • How can we connect and reflect on nature through writing?

Learning Objectives

Students will be able to...

  • Discuss the diversity of plants, animals, and abiotic features in an ecosystem

  • Analyze literary components of nature writing

  • Compose their own nature writing piece

Thinking Skills

  • Observation

  • Critical Thinking

  • Compare and Contrast

  • Literary Analysis

  • Creative Writing

Background Information

  • This is a fully self-facilitated field trip and will be planned and led by school staff and not NPS park staff.  

  • This field trip can be completed at any location within the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal NHP.  In the field trip instructions, we provide instructions for a walk at some possible locations in the park. While we don’t provide specific instructions for other locations, there are many other locations along the canal that have a large diversity of natural features. We encourage you to choose any location in the C&O Canal NHP and walk the towpath with your class! 

  • If you choose the Great Falls Tavern area of the park in Potomac, MD, there is an entrance fee. This is the only entrance fee for locations in the park. There are academic fee waivers available. To learn more about this process or to get the application, email cocanaleducation@nps.gov.  

  • All necessary background and content can be found in the pre-field trip activity and the instructions for the field trip.

Vocabulary

  • Abiotic – not living or composed of living things 

  • Biotic – of, relating to, or caused by living things 

  • Commensalism – a relation between two kinds of organisms in which one obtains food or other benefits from the other without damaging or benefiting it 

  • Diversity – the quality or condition of having or being composed of differing elements (such as forms, types, or ideas) 

  • Ecosystem – the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit 

  • Mutualism – association between different kinds of organisms that benefits both 

  • Nature Writing – (via Wikipedia) nonfiction or fiction prose about the natural environment. It often draws heavily from scientific information and facts while also incorporating philosophical reflection upon various aspects of nature. Works are frequently written in the first person and include personal observations. 

  • Parasitism - an intimate association between organisms of two or more kinds, especially one in which a parasite obtains benefits from a host which it usually injures

Materials

  • Notebook OR paper and clipboard for writing activity

  • Writing utensils

  • Nature Observation Worksheets

  • Nature writing excerpts

  • Binoculars (optional)

  • Computers (optional for post-field trip activity)

Procedures

Lesson Hook/Introduction (5 mins)

Welcome students to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park! Explain where this part of the park is in relation to where the students have come from (miles away, direction, etc.) and explain that this is just a part of the 184.5-mile-long canal that runs along the Potomac River.  

Discussion (10 mins)

To refresh students’ memories about the information they learned during the pre-field trip activity, ask students to recall what biotic vs. abiotic components of the ecosystem are. Have students share their answers. Then tell students to consider how these features might interact with each other. Have students share relationships biotic and abiotic things can have. Possible answers include: predator-prey, competition, parasitism (+/-), mutualism (+/+), commensalism (+/neutral), seed dispersal, reproduction, and provision of a habitat.

Activity 1: Nature Walk and Observations (30-45 mins)

Note - The following directions are written for Fletcher’s Cove, but are adaptable to any location along the canal.   

Prepare to walk: 

Start at the upper parking lot near the wooden bridge over the canal and prepare to start your nature walk. 

  • Near the bridge, there are restrooms available to use before and after your walk. Remind students how important it is for them to observe the natural features of the park today and think about how these features are connected. Make sure students have a writing utensil, a clipboard or notebook, and their binoculars if they brought a pair.  

  • Pass out an Observation Worksheet to each student and read the instructions at the top of the page. This worksheet will help guide and focus students’ observation skills.  

  • Before beginning the walk, explain important safety protocols and park rules: “Today we will be walking on the towpath that runs along the canal. The towpath is not very wide and has drop-offs.  Stay on the right side of the towpath and be mindful of sharing the path with cyclists and other park visitors.  Do not run, push, or shove each other during your walk. It is very important that you stay on the towpath to not disturb other parts of the park and to protect yourself from poisonous plants or wildlife.  

  • Do not alter the park in any way – this means do not leave trash, do not make markings, and do not move or take leaves, rocks, or flowers.  All natural items you find in the park need to stay in the park.  Make sure to drink plenty of water and tell a teacher or chaperone if you are not feeling well. Are there any questions before we start our walk?”

Walk:

Lead the class on a walk on the towpath. If you are at Fletcher’s Cove, walk over the wooden bridge. To your left and right is the towpath running along the canal. Just beyond the towpath down the ramp or stairs is the paved Capital Crescent Trail. Although both are fine to walk on, we recommend walking on the towpath for this field trip, as most bikers will be using the Capital Crescent Trail. Choose a direction to walk for about 15 minutes and then turn around. Once back at your starting point, take the stairs down to the boat rental house.  You can cross the road towards the Potomac River to have students get closer to the water. Make sure students do not get too close to the shore, but allow them to observe the water and any wildlife in this area.  Fletcher’s Cove is a popular fishing location in the District of Columbia in the spring, especially in April and May. Depending on the frequency of stops, this makes for an approximately 1-mile walk. Be observant while you walk and stop to point out interesting wildlife/nature you might encounter. Examples of things to look out for: drumming woodpeckers, hawks or eagles perched in trees, layered rock formations, deer walking around among the trees, peeling bark on a Sycamore tree, or turtles sunning on logs. Make sure students are working on their Observation Worksheet. 

Find an open area: 

For the next activity, we recommend stopping at an open area or in a place with picnic tables/seating. This may be where you entered the park or it could be before you conclude your walk. At Fletcher’s Cove, across from the boat rental in between the canal and the river, there is an area with picnic tables and open grass that will work well. 

Activity 2: Nature Writing (30-45 mins)

  • Introduction to nature writing: In an open area or a seating area, gather students and transition into an introduction about nature writing – what is it? Use the definition and explain that this is a more personal and subjective way to think about nature compared to the ecological relationships we discussed previously. 

  • Read examples: Handout excerpts from nature writers (included at the end of this document). Give students 10 minutes to read their excerpt. Some are shorter than others so students may exchange with a neighbor if they finish early. Then, have students discuss some of the features of what they read. How formal or informal is the writing? Is the piece you read first-person or third-person? What types of literary devices does the author use (imagery, simile, metaphor, etc.)? 

  • Write their own: Using blank paper, have students reflect on what they saw today and how it made them feel by writing their own nature writing piece. They can use the excerpt they read as inspiration or one of the following prompts if they’re having trouble coming up with an idea of their own. 

    • Prompts:  

      •  Relate a natural process or relationship you witnessed today to a personal relationship or experience in your life.   

      • How did this nature walk make you feel and why? 

      •  How do you fit into the natural world? What is your role? 

      • Does the natural world offer an escape from “normal” life? How so or why not?

  • Conclude: Conclude the activity after 15-20 minutes. Students may not be done, but that is okay. Make sure students bring what they wrote back to school with them or collect everyone’s writing pieces to be redistributed later. 

Lesson Conclusions (10 min)

If time permits, before getting back on the bus and returning to school, you can reconvene to discuss some reflection questions: 

  • What was the most interesting thing you observed in the park? 
  • What interactions did you witness in the park? Were they between biotic or abiotic features? 
  • What was challenging about nature writing for you? 
  • Why is nature writing important? 

Park Connections

This lesson and its activities connect to the themes and mission of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park by exploring the ways in which the park serves as a place of refuge. Students reconnect with nature in the unique setting of the C&O Canal NHP and then reflect on it through nature writing. This lesson also connects to the park’s geology and geography interpretive theme inspiring a sense of awe and humility in students because of the unique features of the Potomac River Valley.  

Pre-Field Trip Activity

During the field trip, students will observe biotic and abiotic features of the C&O Canal ecosystem. It is important that students start thinking about what they may see and the connectedness of the ecosystem to prime their observations and nature writing. 

Procedures 

  1. Start by going over important concepts and definitions: The C&O Canal National Historical Park has unique ecosystems. Ecosystems are complex communities of organisms and their environment that function as an ecological unit. Within an ecosystem, there are biotic (living and products of living things) and abiotic (non-living) elements. Biotic and abiotic things interact with each other and have dynamic relationships. Examples of relationships include predator-prey, competition, parasitism (+/-), mutualism (+/+), commensalism (+/neutral), seed dispersal, reproduction, and provision of a habitat. On the field trip, see if you can observe any of these relationships in real time. 

  2. Next, ask students to come up with examples of biotic and abiotic features of the environment they might see. Below is a list we have created. Look up pictures of animals and plants students may not have identified before and put them on the board.

  3. Organize students into small groups with people sitting near them. In their groups, ask students to choose a biotic and an abiotic element and explain how they might interact with each other. Then, do the same thing but instead consider 2 biotic elements. Instruct at least one student in each group to record the group’s ideas. 

  4. Have each group share their group discussion and results with the class. 

 
BIOTIC ABIOTIC
American Elm Tree Litter
American Ash Tree Canal Towpath
Beaver Activity (Dams, Tree Damage, Etc.) Rocks
Bird Guano (Droppings) Wind
Dragonfly And Damselfly Temperature
Great Blue Heron River Water and its Salinity
Indian Grass Sunlight
Lichen Clouds
Moss Soil/Soil pH
Mushrooms Humidity
Redbud Altitude/Elevation
Skinks And Lizards Graffiti (which is illegal)
Vulture Rain
White-Tailed Deer  
Wild Oats  

Post-Field Trip Activity: Continue Writing

During the field trip, students immersed themselves in nature and wrote about what inspired them in the moment without careful planning. This is a valuable exercise and can yield good ideas, however students may not have had time to finish their writing or need time to do editing to improve their writing. Take time in class after the field trip or as a homework assignment to continue writing and editing the piece they started during the field trip. If the technology is available, this would also be an opportunity to type their writing up. 

Post-Field Trip Resources

The C&O Canal NHP would love to hear from you about the nature writing you and your students wrote during your field trip! Please email us at cocanaleducation@nps.gov telling us about your trip, how many students participated, where you went, what you wrote about, etc. We would love to read what your students wrote and learn how the park inspires them!  Thank you for visiting our park! 

Nature Writing Excerpts

“I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into an orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” – Henry David Thoreau, from Walden 

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“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.” – Henry David Thoreau, from Walden 

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“Narnia is what McGill calls the wetland area that beavers have created here by damming the creek that runs through Long Green Farm, fifteen miles north of Baltimore. As soon as I step into the wetland, the landscape changes so dramatically, it feels as if I might just have slipped through the enchanted wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s famous series. While just a moment ago we were standing on a farm road, flanked on either side by wide fields of soybeans and hay, we are now moving through an iconic forest wetland. The air has cooled and before us the ground is silvered with water. Somewhere near the center and down deep in this swampy expanse, Long Green Creek is running through, but you wouldn’t know it unless you hiked to the far end and saw the dam that the beavers have built there. Spires of dead trees punctuate the scene, which is teeming with birds. Meanwhile, everywhere I look I see an extraordinary variety of grasses, sedge, and aquatic vegetation. McGill turns around and grins. I am glad I wore my waders, because the water is way above my knees. Once they entered the wardrobe, that famous portal to Narnia, the kids met Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, who stood on two legs and spoke to the children, becoming their guides. The beavers we are looking for here moved in six years ago.” – Leila Philip, from Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America  

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“I love walking up Cadillac Mountain at dawn to see the sunrise, the first glint of light that appears in the United States from equinox to equinox. I love seeing the bodies of blue islands surface like whales at low tide and disappear at high, and the lobster buoys sprinkled over the waters like confetti. I love walking the rocky coast and finding brittle stars with outstretched legs crawling on wet, slippery rocks. I love how the sea anemones open and close like flowers with the inrushing tide. And I love retreating from the edge of the water into damp woods soft with moss and fresh with fir. In the midst of birches and maples, lichen-drenched boulders in dappled light become the stage set for Noh Theater.” – Terry Tempest Williams, from The Hour of Land 

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“After sleeping a few hours, I stole quietly out of the camp, and climbed the mountain that stands guard between two glaciers. The ground was frozen, making the climbing difficult in the steepest places; but the views over the icy bay, sparkling beneath glorious effulgence of the sky, were enchanting. It seemed then a sad thing that any part of so precious a night had been lost in sleep. The starlight was so full that I distinctly saw not only the bay with its multitude of glittering bergs, but most of the lower portions of the glaciers, lying pale and spirit-like amid the huge silent mountains. The nearest glacier in particular was so distinct that it seemed to be glowing with light that came from within itself. Not even in dark nights have I ever found any difficulty in seeing large glaciers; but on this mountain-top, amid so much ice, in the heart of so clear and frosty a night, everything was luminous, and I seemed to be poised in a vast hollow between two skies of equal brightness. How strong I felt after my exhilarating scramble, and how glad I was that my good angel had called me before the glorious night succeeding so glorious a morning had been spent!” – John Muir, from The Discovery of Glacier Bay 

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“The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass 

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“When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the centre of forest communication, protection and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do. How is it possible for them to send warning signals, recognition messages and safety dispatches as rapidly as telephone calls? How do they help one another through distress and sickness? Why do they have human-like behaviours, and why do they work like civil societies? After a lifetime as a forest detective, my perception of the woods has been turned upside down. With each new revelation, I am more deeply embedded in the forest. The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience and healing.” – Suzanne Simard, from Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest 

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“After a week of warm, almost sultry weather, the bluebells that had lit up the woods on the other side of my study window disappeared. The bloodroot flowers had faltered, and even the violets were beginning to fade. I was so unwilling to say goodbye to the ephemerals that I decided to drive an hour north up the river to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in hopes of outrunning the end of the season at the edge of the mountains. I was unable to admit to myself how desperate I was to catch a last high of ephemeral euphoria and the warm feelings of ecotonal convergence.” – Charlotte Taylor Fryar, from Potomac Fever 

 

 

Tags: self-facilitated field trip ecology writing literature observation self-guided

Last updated: March 4, 2026