Hello fellow plant lovers. My name is Rachel Webb and I live in Clam Gulch, Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula with my husband and three kids. My passion for nature stems from growing up in a rural area with no neighbors where plants were my only friends and the solitude of the desert was my backyard. I am originally from the deserts of Southern Utah and grew up wandering the red rocks of Moab and Zion. However, when I met my husband in 2007, who grew up in upstate New York with a fascination with Alaska, we packed up and moved to Alaska.
We have been on a journey ever since to live self-sufficient and spend as much time together as a family as possible. We have been traveling and working all across the state and have lived in the Mat-su Valley in an RV, Southeast on a sailboat, and now we finally settled and bought land to build a homestead in Southcentral where we have been for the past three years. We run sled dogs in the winter and forage in the summer.
I am a certified elementary teacher and taught in public schools for over 10 years. I have always homeschooled my own children because I believe children need ample time outside with unstructured learning opportunities but unfortunately, they do not get that in public school. In 2016 I opened a nature preschool in Juneau where I immersed preschool aged children in nature all day, rain or shine. I now work as a homeschool contact teacher helping other families with their homeschool journey. This is my final class in earning my OEC in Ethnobotany. I plan on learning all I can about plants and how they can help us so that I can open another nature school and teach children about the amazing plants friends all around them.
I am currently in the process of building a house and all of my belongings are boxed up, including my microscope. So, until I can find it, I have ordered a lens for my iPhone to use as a microscope. I am excited to be a part of this class and hope my children can learn alongside me.
Welcome Rachel,
what an amazing journey! Good luck with building your homestead. I am sure you will have a great time there. Kids are little sponges and will absorb anything you teach them very quickly, many students who have taken this class have told me that the hikes to find plants were often an opportunity to get out with the kids and find flowering plants and learn their names and characteristics. You can also work with them to take a plant press along and make miniature herbarium sheets and make a small little herbarium of all the plants that grow around your area. Most kids really get into this and enjoy creating something that is meaningful to them. I often do these activities when we have open house at the museum or when we visit rural village throughout Alaska. See below from students in Anderson School in the Denali Borough School District.