 When I was younger, I had two natural places that were sacred to me. Northern Michigan and the Gulf Coast of Florida. I knew the Michigan woods behind our house and the shorelines along the lake so well that I could mark my location by a tree or sand dune. Along the Gulf Coast of Sarasota, I'd let the wet sand filter through my fingers to reveal coquinas, or I'd pick up fiddler crabs and sea stars. Now that I have a kid of my own, I encourage him to be curious about and feel a connection to nature. I take him to the shores of Lake Michigan to look for rocks, the waterways of Florida to kayak through the mangrove tunnels, and on trips big and small to explore our world. Being in nature allows both of us to know ourselves and each other better, to be curious about the world and to feel a connection to and concern for nature. Because having these sacred places is fundamental to my memories of childhood and to the person I am today, I am always surprised when my students in American studies at the Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, North Carolina tell me that they don't spend time in nature. When I began thinking about ways that I could introduce the benefits of being in nature to my students, I naturally thought of transcendentalism and the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, keeping the National Geographic framework in mind. I also wanted to get students outside to inspire a new perspective in the way they thought about nature and to inspire curiosity about their relationship to it. Emerson is a residential high school for academically gifted students from across the state of North Carolina. The focus on STEM means that many of my students are skeptical of what they call the old writings. You can hear this in the following question a student asked during our class discussion. I have any basis for what they're claiming that I'm all connected or they're saying they want to. Because of this skepticism, during our study of Emerson's nature in Thoreau's Walden, I wanted to connect the author's philosophical musings and the benefits of being outside to contemporary sources that show scientific evidence of these claims. To do this, I chose to use the 2017 National Geographic article We Are Wired To Be Outside, which is an interview with Florence Williams about her then-new book, The Nature Fix. After reading and discussing Emerson and Thoreau, I distributed a set of We Are Wired To Be Outside and divided it into sections for students to read, discuss, and connect to Emerson and Thoreau. They also had an additional reading of a longer excerpt from The Nature Fix. Having them read from these works fit in perfectly with the curiosity framework. The blend of philosophy with science resonated with many of the students and allowed them to make connections between philosophical texts extolling the benefits of being in nature and contemporary research that supported these rather esoteric claims. You can see in the following clip from our class discussion that reading the article and relating it to Emerson and Thoreau allow the students to deepen their understanding of the importance of our connection to nature. What are our connections then between Walden and Florence Williams, The Nature Fix? So like birds are great and Thoreau is very excited to be living with birds and quotes somebody and he's like an abode without birds is like a meet without seasoning and he's just like so happy to have caged himself near birds and he's just like having some fun. Yeah, and he says that he's so thankful to be hearing ones that the villager cannot hear. So then what's the connection to the Nature Fix reading? That hearing birds makes you happy. After our discussions of Emerson, Thoreau and the National Geographic article, I wanted to get my students outside so that they could see if the claims about nature held true for them. I also wanted to assess their understanding of the ideas in a non-traditional way. To do this, I designed an assignment that required students to create a three-dimensional sculpture that conveyed transcendental ideas. To get outside, we headed off campus to a nature trail that is about a 10-minute walk from campus. While we were walking and while we were on the trail, I asked students to not talk with each other so that they could spend our time activating all of their senses. The walk outside definitely connected them to the natural world, specifically on a local scale because we were walking in the neighborhood in which our campus is located. Many of the students picked up trash on our walk, an unintended but lovely connection to our ecological footprint. Sitting still in nature was a connection to spatial awareness and to the flora and fauna, another ecological connection. We also discussed the personal value of being in nature to the larger question of environmental protection and restoration, which moved our discussion to the cultural, ecological and political scales. On the last day of the unit, students spent about 90 minutes building their sculptures from random supplies and items they brought in from outside. Many of them created fantastic pieces that clearly conveyed the ideas of our discussions and readings. The final part of the sculpture assignment was a paper in which they had to write a formal analysis of their sculpture and how it conveyed transcendentalist concepts. Having students create a visual representation of a complex idea and write an analysis of the piece allowed them to work within the National Geographic Communication Framework, specifically creating and publishing content across a diverse range of media. To engage with the material on a personal level and I think in part because of that it really impacted me personally because I've always really been a kid into nature and I've loved spending time outside but after this I began keeping a journal and writing more poetry. Transcendentalism Unit as a whole helped me better understand the importance of my relationship with nature. It fostered a greater appreciation for experiencing the meaning of life by forming deep connections with the outdoor world and being one with it.