California's Coastside Land Trust is connecting children to science and nature

The Junior Land Stewards Program at California’s Coastside Land Trust was born from a simple but urgent observation: young people need meaningful opportunities to connect with, and care for, the land around them.

In 2018, Coastside Land Trust’s board members recognized that 4th grade is a uniquely formative window. It's the age when children begin developing their own identities and engaging with the world more analytically, when they start to understand that their actions have real consequences for the places and communities they love.

With startup funding from the Tomberg Family Philanthropies, Coastside Land Trust piloted the program at Alvin Hatch Elementary School in the Cabrillo Unified School District. The timing was intentional: the land trust saw a gap in the district's environmental education continuum. With growing support from funders, including the Granada Community Services District, the California Coastal Conservancy, Maxwell Hanrahan and the Midpeninsula Open Space Trust, the program gradually expanded from a single school to all four elementary sites in the Cabrillo Unified School District by 2023.

The program brings together two generations of learners each year. At its core, Junior Land Stewards serves approximately 180–200 fourth graders. Roughly 65 Half Moon Bay High School students, with coordination from department head Joseph Centoni, participate as trained field docents, deepening their own connection to place and environmental stewardship while mentoring the younger students they guide, leading them through small-group activities, creating a meaningful intergenerational thread that runs through the heart of the program.

A fourth-grader’s experience

At the heart of Junior Land Stewards is nature journaling, a practice that is deceptively simple and profoundly transformative. Journaling requires no prior knowledge, no special equipment and no particular skill. What it does require is slowing down, looking closely and recording what you notice. In doing so, students develop observational acuity, scientific vocabulary and a habit of attention that serves them across every discipline and throughout their lives — from elementary school through higher education and into careers in science, conservation, design and beyond. Nature journaling is the thread that runs through everything in the program, giving students a personal, portable relationship with the natural world that belongs entirely to them.

The program unfolds across four field trips and three in-class lab sessions woven throughout the school year, each building on the last, with field trips and labs falling in separate months, allowing students time to observe change over time.

On the first field trip, students get their hands dirty right away. They begin restoring a designated area of open space by pulling invasive plants and sheet mulching, preparing the ground for a future pollinator garden. Then, they set off on a naturalist scavenger hunt, searching for seasonal signs of life: birds, plants and animals that tell the story of where and when they are.

Back on campus in a separate lab session, students plant native plants from the seeds collected from the very open space where they work and from past Junior Land Stewards gardens. They watch their seedlings grow over time and conduct a simple but meaningful experiment, comparing a fertilized and an unfertilized plant to observe the difference firsthand.

The second field trip goes deeper into nature journaling. Students play observation games and make scientific recordings along the way, practicing the art of noticing. A separate companion lab brings them indoors to investigate soil health, examining texture, erosion and structure, and analyzing a sample taken directly from the habitat garden they are helping to build.

On the third field trip, everything comes together. Students bring their own seedlings that they’ve grown from seeds planted months earlier) and plant them in the garden bed they prepared on day one. They conduct a soil investigation and take time to reflect in their nature journals on the arc of work they've done. A third lab session, held on a separate day, rounds out this phase with a flower dissection, where students learn the anatomy of a flower and how pollination works, connecting the plants they've grown to the ecological relationships that sustain them.

The fourth and final field trip is a celebration of stewardship and discovery. Students return to see how their plants have fared (some thriving, some blooming, some that didn't make it) and tend to their garden by weeding, watering and caring for what they've grown. The year culminates in an epic naturalist bingo scavenger hunt, where students fan out across the landscape searching for butterflies, signs of spring, native and invasive plants, different bird species, earthworms, spiderwebs and more. It's joyful, rigorous and a fitting send-off for a year spent learning to pay attention.

A science high school student’s experience

Before ever setting foot in the field with a 4th grader, high school field guides go through a dedicated training program rooted in the same place-based learning philosophy that defines JLS. Training takes place at Coastside Land Trust’s Wavecrest Open Space, where students learn directly from local expert speakers in birding, geology, native plants, history and stewardship. These aren't classroom lectures; they're immersive sessions in the landscape that students will eventually help bring to life for younger learners.

High school guides also receive hands-on nature journaling training, building the observation skills and facilitation confidence they need to guide 4th graders through their own journaling practice in the field. The goal is not just to prepare them as docents, but to deepen their own relationship with the land so that what they share with students comes from a place of genuine connection and curiosity. The high school students also gain a more in-depth understanding of scientific observation, which can help them succeed both in school and in future careers.

Half Moon Bay High School has seen steady growth in its AP environmental science program, and while we can't claim full credit for that, we like to think Junior Land Stewards has planted a few seeds along the way. The most meaningful evidence of that came this year, when we reached a milestone we had long hoped for. For the first time, some of our high school field guides are students who experienced the program as 4th graders and are now coming back to guide the next generation. That kind of full-circle moment is exactly what this program was built for.

The impact

We are at a critical moment for our local ecosystems. The coastal landscapes that define this community need people who will fight for them, restore them, and care for them for generations to come. That starts with children who have knelt in the soil, pulled an invasive weed, planted a native seedling, and watched it grow. Stewardship is a practice, and like any practice, it takes root earliest when it begins young.

The children in this program are not just learning about the natural world — they are being welcomed into a relationship with it. And that relationship, formed early, has the power to last a lifetime.

Beyond conservation, Junior Land Stewards opens doors to career possibilities students may never have considered, including ecology, environmental science, conservation biology, landscape design and more. When a child discovers that they love being outside and that the natural world fascinates them, that's a meaningful spark worth nurturing.

There is also something quieter and equally vital happening. In a world that pulls children's attention in a hundred directions, nature journaling asks them to slow down, look closely, and connect with the place where they live. That practice of presence and attention is increasingly recognized as essential to children's mental health, and a sense of place, once formed, is something they carry with them long after the school year ends.

Looking to the future

One of the most exciting new programs for Coastside Land Trust is the launch of Wingwatchers for the 2025-26 school year, a brand-new bird ecology and community science program for 7th graders. Wingwatchers was designed to extend the arc of place-based learning that JLS begins in 4th grade, giving students a chance to reconnect with their local environment at a new level of scientific depth. Working in partnership with the San Mateo County Bird Alliance and California State Parks, 7th graders will develop bird identification skills, collect real community science data, and explore the ecological relationships between birds, plants and habitat right here on the San Mateo coast. We are incredibly excited about what this program can become and what it means for the land trust’s vision of nurturing young stewards across multiple stages of their education.

On a personal note, this work means everything to me. As a parent of two children in the Cabrillo Unified School District, I have seen firsthand how transformative these experiences are, not just for my own kids but for their classmates. The 2026-27 school year will be a milestone for me: for the first time, I will have one child in Junior Land Stewards and one in Wingwatchers. That fact alone tells me we are building something that matters. In a world where children are spending more and more time on screens, getting them outside, slowing them down, and connecting them to the place they call home feels more urgent than ever — for their happiness, their mental health, and honestly, for the future of our planet.