2026 LEEF Conference Wakulla Wild

Since first sharing our Wild About Wildflowers! curriculum at the 2018 LEEF conference, the Florida Wildflower Foundation has expanded and refreshed the guide to include new activities, updated resources and deeper connections to Florida standards. Designed for formal and nonformal educators alike, the curriculum introduces students to the beauty, ecology and importance of Florida’s native wildflowers and pollinators through hands-on, inquiry-based learning. This session will showcase highlights of the updated guide, including activities that explore wildflower habitats, pollinator relationships and real-world conservation actions students can take in their communities. Presenters will share strategies for incorporating these activities into a variety of learning settings and provide resources to help participants adapt them for their own students and audiences. Join us to discover how Florida’s wildflowers can spark curiosity, deepen ecological understanding, and empower the next generation of environmental stewards.

The AWE curriculum is developed around an anchoring phenomenon of harmful algal blooms. The short AWE unit begins with a watershed lesson, followed by a longer lesson on food webs/trophic levels/interconnectedness. The unit culminates in an investigation in which students use what they have learned to discover how nutrient loading can affect aquatic habitat quality and return to the anchoring phenomenon to figure out its causes. All lessons meet the call for ambitious science teaching practices and the national NGSS frameworks and standards and builds on required Florida NGSSS standards (Windschitl et al, 2018; NRC, 2012; NGSS 2013). The unit has been successfully pilot-tested through several iterations by many experienced teachers and revised based on their input. Participants will get to experience some of the activities and discuss the entire curriculum.

This workshop requires pre-registeration. Adding the workshop to your agenda in Sched is not the same as registering for the workshop!

To register, please email [email protected] before March 20.

Have you ever heard of a children’s book that features an endangered snail kite as its main character? At our Everglades-focused, South Florida nature center, neither had we – and we needed one! – so we decided to create our own. Join us to learn from our center’s experience writing and illustrating *Sam the Snail Kite and the Secret of the Everglades* as a springboard for creative, place-based literacy programming and community outreach. We will share tips and cautionary tales about writing your own book, as well as techniques for using children’s picture books to engage young readers in the natural world at your site.

Have you ever wondered where the sand on the beaches in Florida originates? Why are there rolling hills between Tampa and Orlando? What is the reason shark teeth occur in rocks far from coastlines? Florida’s geologic history provides answers. Connect with geologists and educators at the Florida Geological Survey (FGS) to learn about Florida’s geology, explore the work that the FGS does and discover resources we provide to educators, including 3D scans of Florida fossils and virtual museum tours.

What do 15 years of growing look like and where we are finding our next generation?
Sharing our story about using Growing Up WILD in our Florida Youth Conservation Centers Network (FYCCN) and evaluation of this national program from educators to the children that benefit from the curriculum. We will ‘show and tell’ how you can bring this award-winning early childhood education curriculum to your classrooms, centers, and business that work with children ages 3-7.

The State Coordinator for Project WILD in Florida, Yatska Valentin, will bring resources, only for presentation participants, on how you can become a facilitator or become educators for the program. Learn more about Project WILD, Aquatic WILD and Flying WILD opportunities in your area. Patricia Brown, Assistant Director at the Joe Budd Youth Conservation Center in Midway, Fl. will share the success of the program in their monthly program both on site and in schools. We will tell the story of FYCCN and how you can become a partner with some great resources for you to use.
This presentation will include activities that you can immediately use.

We will teach about the marine specimens that we supply to universities and how they can be used as teaching tools in educating children about marine science, embryology, cellular reaggregation, and different phyla of organisms.

In this workshop, attendees will go through one of the new Project Learning Tree Collection books - -Together for Birds Target Grades K-2 

https://www.plt.org/curriculum/theme-based-activity-collections/

Each collection offers hands-on activities for teachers and non-formal educators, youth group leaders and home schoolers, to connect youth to nature and the outdoors.Each Collection is designed to be flexible, and the activities that comprise each collection can be used as individual, stand-alone lessons, or all together as a cohesive unit of instruction using a storyline technique.

This workshop requires pre-registeration and a $6 fee. Adding the workshop to your agenda in Sched is not the same as registering for the workshop!

To register, please email [email protected] before March 20.