Saturday, January 14, 2012

Nature Games 2

Another activity we'd do at camp was an "Around the World". I would have the students envision that the basketball court was a map of the world, and ask them to move around to different places where they might find certain things (Where they were born, where they would find an elephant, where they'd be in a desert, etc.) I loved seeing all the different answers! After the elephant question, the kids were in Asia, Africa, India, the LA Zoo...all across the globe :)

I liked this activity because it not only got the kids thinking about different places around the world, and gave opportunity to discuss different ecosystems they might not have learned a lot about, but it got them thinking spatially, about where places would be in relation to each other.

The game I saw children enjoying the most was a game showing different adaptations animals might use in the wild to get resources or avoid being caught by predators. We had a blindfolded student in the middle of the group, with an object, representing a resource, at their feet. During a round we'd point at students to approach the center and try to get the object without being detected. The blindfolded person had to point where they heard noise in order to get people out. The people had to return to their spots with the object in order to be successful. I saw so many different techniques. I saw distraction by throwing twigs in other places (even nearer other players in order to get them out) or when a player only moved when another player was making noise. We witnessed competition when several people reached the center and back to their original locations undetected, but since there was only one object, only one player was successful. We got to see techniques from the point of view of the sneaky prey and from the point of view of the keen predator. We got to discuss why an animal might not be able to use their sight to detect food or dangers. Honestly, watching how the kids reacted to the parameters of this game was super informative to me!

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Nature Games 1

A friend asked for new ideas for her environmental education program. As I was reminiscing about a few projects and games I've done in the past, I realized I had never mentioned them on here. Considering what this blog was made for, that's a little bit of a major oversight on my part. Sometimes you don't think of your old stand-bys because, well, they're not news to you. So, a little time-travel magic and we'll talk about some of the games I pulled out at camp to fill in some time

I had a game that I adapted from a book of wildlife games. It was a big hit with the kids! It was sort of like "Sharks and Minnows", but with a twist. One child would be selected to be "it", this was the predator. The rest of the children were "prey". I had suggestions of everything from fox and rabbits to komodo dragon and water buffalo! The prey then had to run across the playing field, avoiding being caught (tagged) by the predator, to gather the food that was on the other side (we used balls to represent food.) They then had to return the food to their families waiting at home (the starting line.) There were a few safeties, hula hoops that represented bushes the prey could hide in. At the end of a round, any prey that was caught enabled the predator population to increase (a tagged "prey" child was an additional "predator" in the next round.) I found this worked best when each predator was only allowed one prey per round. Any predator that was not able to catch a prey in a round was returned to the "prey" side (representing a predator who died, and a subsequent increase in the prey population since they were able to get home safely with food and thus reproduce.)

After a few rounds this very neatly displayed the relationship between predator and prey population sizes. As the predator population rose, the prey population declined, forcing a decline in predator population, which allowed for a rise in the prey population and so on. By the end of the game, any of the children could describe this relationship to you, based solely on their observations. Plus they kept begging me for more rounds after I said time was up :)