go outside and play...

and while you are there, share some learning! lenny, christian, kevin, mike, and i spent three mornings with canaan elementary school classes out in the canaan town forest on the trails about the nature hut. leading groups of 15-20, kindergartners-forth graders, was a lesson in engaging curiosities and harnessing energies.

before we even got the kids into the woods, i had to grit my way through a barrage of logistics involved with moving school children off campus. getting the word out to teachers--after developing a 'word' to actually get out--arranging bussing, permission slips for parents, bus forms for teachers, special medical issues for students, all individually important in making field trips work, together almost overwhelmed me. i don't do well coordinating what i reflexively put in the 'bureaucracy' bucket. but with clear direction and help from kamala, it was all done without leaving any scars.


while these logistical ducks were being arranged in tidy rows, lenny and i were creating curriculum. given the site's environment, three focus areas stood out and would match perfectly with three classes with each busload: forested wetlands, animals, and plants. our individual expertise also matched, christian and kevin took the wetlands, lenny  got animals, and i plants. we took some umbrella terms and objectives for each and discussed possible schemes to address them across the different age levels. intellectual exchange is almost as much fun for me as being with the kids and doesn't get any better than designing and generating with someone like lenny.

wednesday, thursday, and friday, from 8:30 to just past 12:00, about 250 children came out and took in what we arranged...




lenny and christian had brought a few buckets of pond life, along with a 'small' collection of lenny's animal artifacts and set them up in the hut.







each group spent two half of their animal and wetland sessions in the hut discovering all sorts of things at each table...

the plant group started with a leave no trace lesson, gathered around a lone lady slipper just behind the hut. amazingly the plant lasted all three days with only one 'semi-trampling' under the foot of an eager kinder in the very last group, on the very last day. leave as small a trace as you can...





when groups weren't at the hut, they were slowly filing along the trails, observing: looking, hearing, smelling, and feeling--which often included resisting the urge to pick, maybe even taste. while there were challenges to walking single file along a rather narrow trail, imagine how hard it would be for a youngster not to jump off into the woods to point out or just touch some way cool thing they just spotted.

staying on the trail was fairly imperative when the groups got to the old beaver damn. len and i had come out the weekend before and built a few sections of boardwalk across the wettest of spots. even with the 'bridge' more than a foot wide, we were hoping we didn't lose anybody into the wet and muck. the damn was no longer active as the beavers had built a newer one further north.

in the picture above, one of 4th grade lad gets precariously close to at least one wet foot, and dr reitsma looks like an owl! over the three days one student fell in--but not above their knees--and one child left a sneaker 'suctioned' into the mud. while there were students who would have welcomed a dip into the 'pond', there were a few of the youngest that seemed a bit anxious, even of walking through the dry parts of the forest.

all in all, it was a fine week and feedback from teachers, staff, students, even a grandparent, only made it finer. getting all those classes out into the local woods worked so well we agreed that we will definitely do it again next year.