Colchester Camp

This week I ran a "From the Ground Up" program in Colchester. The themes were similar to the one I ran in Milton last month, but this program was different based on the places we were able to hike, the particular interests of the kids involved, and the things we saw. For example, in this camp we discussed some orienteering and even measured our individual pace length for measuring distances in the woods.

On our way out of the woods we found some hula hoops abandoned on the playground

We spent the first two days at one site, talking about soil, groundwater, bedrock, plants, trees, some animals, and (of course) playing games. Then the third and fourth days we were at a second site where we had access to a different type of forest as well as a tiny part of Colchester bog (I posed about this site before, read about it here.) We saw several carnivorous pitcher plants, as well as cotton grass and peat moss, plants very specific to bog environments. We also found a plant we all recognized very easily. I painstakingly identified, and was the first to eat and confirm, wild blueberries! Once we were sure, we all got to chow down. There were other berries around, so we were all careful to notice the difference and only pick the right ones.

Picking blueberries

These children really picked up on tree identification, which I appreciated because it's one of my favorite parts to talk about. After only one day teaching different types of trees, the next day they came in pointing out ones they remembered. "Look, there's a white pine. And that one's a hemlock!" I barely had to use the dichotomous key with them. But I wanted them to see how to use one, and they really found it interesting.

My new, improved dichotomous key. Now with more trees!

Identifying a moose (striped) maple with the dichotomous key.

The distinct striped bark and big, three-lobed leaves of the moose maple.

As when I was teaching camp in California, the kids' favorite game to play was a game teaching strategies animals might use in the wild to avoid being caught by predators (or to catch their prey.) These kids decided to call it "Snake Eye" since snakes rely on other senses besides sight, such as hearing and scent, since their eyes are not always very strong. In the game, one player is blindfolded and has to "catch" others trying to sneak up on them only using their hearing.

 Listening...

 Nope, not there...

 Ahh, that's the ticket!

 Listening...

 Sneaking...

Sneaking...

Contrary to the way this photo looks, it was actually taken 

moments before she caught him.

We played this game in various places so we could see how the terrain affected the strategies each person used. We also discussed real-world applications of these strategies for animals.

I got some great photos of the students demonstrating a principle during our astronomy lesson on the last day. We discussed how since the moon takes 28 days to rotate on its axis as well as 28 days to revolve around the Earth, the same side is always facing the Earth. As we watch the phases of the moon over a month, we are seeing one day happen on that side of the moon.

 The pillow is to show the side of the moon facing us is denser than the other

 Rotating and revolving, moon around Earth, Earth around sun.

 Switching up the roles to give everyone a turn. We were all very dizzy!

 Drawing our own constellations on a star map

Still a favorite of all the kids, I brought my pet baby corn snake for everyone to learn about and choose to touch or hold (or not.) Everyone in this group was really excited to hold Ned.

And now for the Ned glamour shots:

Today a girl said to me "This is the best week of my life!" (apparently not only because of nature camp, but because she gets to go to the drive-in movies over the weekend.) And that right there is what keeps me doing the work I do!

Milton Camp

We had an amazing week! I ran a "From the Ground Up" program in Milton, and we learned and explored and played all over the park. As the name (and previous version of the program) suggests, we started out on the first day talking about soil, geology, and hydrology, worked up to plants and trees, then animals, then weather and astronomy. We looked at how each builds on the foundations provided by the other aspects of the natural world.

We climbed a few trees that blocked the trail

The tidbits that stuck with the children during this week made me smile. For example, after discussing soil layers the first day, all week any leaves were called O layer and any bare soil was the A layer. "Look Lisa, we're walking on the A layer!"

Someone dug this trench and so we were able to see soil layers!

This group's creativity astounded me. I taught them the vocab word "snag" (Remember? A favorite of the little lady's.) Then we reached a fork in the trail, I asked them to "hang a right," and they countered with "don't you mean snag a right?" And when I asked them not to touch something, like an animal that's just minding its own business, they said "Yeah, we should leaf it alone!"

They also liked to call the puddles we passed "frog mansions." I loved that. We spooked a frog into the water, and then found it under the mud. It was amazing, the frog stayed stock-still, even when we were pushing it through the water. It was firmly dedicated to pretending to be a rock. I hadn't seen that before!

They all loved to be able to identify and use jewelweed, because it's so useful if you get a cut, sting, or poison ivy exposure in the woods. Each of them was able to identify it by the end of the second day.

Rubbing jewelweed on a mosquito bite for relief

I had planned on spending most of the time outside, and then some weather happened. Thankfully we had some activities that were better suited to indoors, such as astronomy. I had a map of the stars visible in summer in Vermont for each of them. They used it to design their own constellations that they could actually find in the night sky!

After this activity, one of the girls drew her own star map

and asked ME to design constellations for it.

I also have a secret weapon for making rainy days run smoother, his name is Ned. 

Ned is my personal pet, I just got him this year (he's probably only two years old!) When I asked each of the kids what their favorite part of the week was, they each said, without hesitation, "Holding Ned!"

Another favorite activity was playing "Star-Nosed Mole." While we played a lot of games and activities this week, the kids asked to play a few rounds of this game every day! One girl really loved the game because she was "really into worms." I've never heard that one before, but, whatever floats your boat!

 Look at how smug that worm is, safe from the blind mole (as long as he's quiet!)

The group dynamic really affects the way a lesson goes. I always have a lesson plan, but I stay very fluid so if the kids show particular interests then that's what the lesson will become. For example, we spent a good chunk of time discussing wild edible foods. One of the kids even taught me that you can make a dessert out of the seed pods of timothy grass! We found a lot of wood sorrel, which looks like clovers only has heart-shaped leaves and tastes a bit lemony. We also saw a lot of strawberry plants (with no fruit yet) and blackberries!

The whole week was full of special discoveries and hypotheses:

We saw the difference between sapwood and heartwood as displayed 

where the sap leaked out of this white pine when it was cut. 

We smelled wintergreeny "sweet" (black) birch 

(and tasted it too!)

We saw this GIANT snail!

 (close-up)

Other good finds include a beaver stump near the swamp, some insects with unbelievable coloration, and many, many red efts!

After School: Animals

In our "From the Ground Up" after school program, we've talked about 1) the soil and how it lays foundation for plants, 2) the plants themselves, and now 3) we're talking about what the plants do for animals and vice-versa.

We saw standing dead trees ("snags") and discussed how they provide different habitat for animals than fallen dead trees (for example, birds make their homes in cavities on snags.) 

We talked about detritus (matter that is no longer living) and the organisms that break that down. This really shows that worms and fungi are crucial to our ecosystems, because otherwise the nutrients locked away in detritus wouldn't be made available for new plants.

We looked for wildlife signs (and frogs) in this stream.

We identified some mast trees (trees that produce food for animals, such as white pine cones or beech nuts.) And once we did this, we had pretty much all the vocabulary to play the wildlife BINGO game I designed for just this occasion!

Looking for items on their cards

We did have to discuss what "invertebrate" meant, and what examples of behavior we saw count as defense mechanisms. Which was perfect because the point of this activity was to raise questions and creative ideas. For example, the little lady used herself to fill the categories of omnivore, two-legged animal, and mammal. 

She asked for a hard surface to write on,

I told her where to find one.

At one point the little lady pointed at me and said "I see a two-legged mammal right there!" At which her friend pointed at both of us, saying "I see two!" Our third friend, who had wandered off a bit looking for snags, called back "I see three, and they're laughing like crazy people!"

As we walked back to the school all three of the girls looked for a black birch tree so they could chew on the end of a twig and taste the sweet wintergreen like we did last week.

Nature Games 3

I really love these next two games. I was introduced to them only recently.

The first is an adaptation on Blind Man's Bluff entitled Star Nosed Mole. The mole is blindfolded (because moles are blind and thus use their other senses to detect prey) and the rest of the children were worms trying to avoid being caught by the mole. I joined in this game, though it was slower-paced than tag, it was much more nerve-wracking. I watched a student avoid capture by simply ducking under an outstretched arm, centimenters from a solid tag. I personally hid behind my co-worms when the tagger was close, so they'd be tagged first and the mole would go look else-where!

A star-nosed mole!

The next game we played that day was Squirrel. We each had 20 items, in this case black beans, to store for winter. Half of us were red squirrels who bury their chache all in one location, the other half were grey squirrels who make several different hidey-holes. Then we had to collect food, not from our own store but seeing if we could locate other squirrels' food. We had 31 seconds to find food, to represent the 31 days in January. I went hungry that month :( After a few more months we were allowed to return to our own stores of food. I returned only to find that all of mine (I was a grey squirrel) had been found and pillaged. I didn't have a very successful survival technique I suppose, but the kids were much more lucky. And we all had a great time!

A red squirrel enjoying one of its finds

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!

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 :)