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Core Characteristics:

• Natural Orientation – identification with living organisms and their environments
• Attribute Orientation – finding common traits among items
• Categorization – identifying categories by attribute
• Hierarchical Reasoning – ranking items by significance and relationship
• Schematic Memory – internalizing and recalling information by attribute, category or hierarchy

Students with a strong naturalist intelligence:

• Are intrinsically organized
• Demonstrate an empathy with nature
• Pick up on subtle differences in meaning
• Like to make collections of materials
• Enjoy sorting and organizing materials
• Impose their own sense of order on new information
• Respond to semantic mapping activities
• Prefer charts, tables, diagrams and timelines

Support this intelligence in the classroom by:

• Using graphic organizers
• Providing sorting and attribute grouping tasks
• Brainstorming categories
• Charting hierarchies
• Utilizing semantic mapping of ideas
• Building portfolios of student work
• Making connections to the natural world
• Modeling strategies for finding common attributes, categories and hierarchies across the curriculum

Technologies that stimulate this intelligence:

• Magnifying glass
• Microscope
• Telescope
• Bug box
• Scrap book
• Sandwich bag
• Plastic container
• Database
• Laserdisc
• Floppy drive
• File manager
• Semantic mapping tools