2026 LEEF Conference Wakulla Wild

Discover how Bonnet Springs Park creates outdoor learning spaces that welcome everyone. This session will highlight common barriers to access, share creative strategies for overcoming them, and showcase the benefits of prioritizing accessibility. Participants will leave with applicable tools, inclusive resources, and examples of how program facilitators can integrate accessibility into uncommon spaces.

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.

Environmental educators often rely on grants to fund their work. The logic model is a foundational tool that not only strengthens grant proposals but also is fundamental to program planning, implementation and evaluation. This workshop will use the collaborative, inclusive power of liberating structures with the rigor of the logic model approach to co-create and teach environmental educators how to write an effective grant proposal. This will be a hands-on, highly interactive format designed to move participants from abstract ideas to concrete, fundable project plans.

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.

Educators can't always take participants outside to look for birds... and sometimes when we do, the birds don't always cooperate! See how easy it is to teach the skill of using binoculars and the basics to identify birds. Not only is this a fun & easy way to introduce bird watching & identification, but it will also prepare them to look at details when you can go outside to look for birds. Join me on the Great LEEF (fake) Bird Count!

Note:Change in Presenter

Environmental education faces critical challenges in keeping pace with rapidly evolving technological landscapes. AI offers support in planning, content creation, evaluation, and teaching, creating opportunities for innovative and timely content to engage students. This session introduces ways environmental educators can integrate AI into their practice through hands-on activities with various AI tools, while addressing ethical considerations. Participants will gain practical skills to critically apply AI for lesson planning, content development, assessment, and instruction, fostering innovation in the field of environmental education.

This presentation will discuss the use of digital technologies at the University of South Florida Libraries to transform archives from the Florida Environment and Natural History (FLENH) collections into openly accessible resources for educational purposes. The presentation will highlight an approach to digital curation that centers educators and researchers as the key audience. Rooted in strategic archival acquisitions and explored through educator-led partnerships, the team has developed an online repository with more than 74,000 records. This presentation will describe our workflow and openly accessible resource, as well as three key outputs that might be immediately useful to Florida educators. First, the Tampa Through Time Portal is a place-based interactive mapping portal that provides new ways to explore digitized FLENH materials. The ekphrastic Creekshed project, hosted by USF Libraries, uses FLENH archives to inspire local authors and students to write creative works grounded in the local watershed. Finally, the Botanical Gardens 360 Tours and USF Greenways map illustrate new approaches to capturing environmental spaces and pairing them with historic documents to produce immersive contemporary tours.

Content is created each month to educate the campus community on various ways they can positively impact stormwater systems and keep our watershed free of pollutants. Presenters will explain their research, collaboration with partners, and methods of communication.

Indigenous youth in the Amazon navigate rapid social and environmental changes while sustaining traditional knowledge and territorial stewardship. This study collaborates teachers, students and community members of a multiethnic Indigenous territory in the Colombian Amazon. Working alongside Indigenous teachers, researchers explore integrating traditional ecological and biocultural knowledge with K-12 science and environmental education through curriculum co-design. The collaborative process integrates a needs assessment done to understand the community views on education, conservation science, environmental issues and current practices for traditional knowledge articulation. Findings highlight the importance of community-based and traditional knowledge to root learning in the local context and facilitate nature stewardship. The researchers share about their co-design experience and the strategies developed to articulate indigenous and local knowledge with scientific and global perspectives of territories and conservation.

Broward County has a large, diverse group of residents and a limited number of natural areas for people to enjoy. Those that exist are small and not well known by residents. The North Natural Areas Naturalist group has created programing within natural areas, regional parks and libraires to educate the public on the importance of native nature while also promoting wellness, environmental education, and building community.

*NEW Session
Looking for a fun activity to connect all ages to nature and learn more about birds.  This is the session for you.  Can be an extended lesson from the PLT workshop on Saturday or stand alone.  Come learn how to create your own nature journals, and use them to learn more about birds and nature in general.  Go home with your own nature journal and agendas for multiple PLT nature journaling workshops.