Field Trips For America!

 

This week has been super busy with field trips! We started off the week with two days of SEEDS4: Nature Detectives classroom visits for both of the schools who came out to the refuge two weeks ago. They were all stoked to see us again and asked me how the snake I caught while they were at the refuge was doing. We spent about an hour with each class facilitating a lesson plan/activity called "Who Uses Our Schoolyard". This activity teaches the students to change perspective to make more detailed observations and to notice that they see more of the schoolyard when they focus on different perspectives rather than just making general observations. We had them make observations of the whole school yard, looking up, looking down, and then making even more detailed observations using a quadrat method with a hula hoop and a metre stick dividing the area into two parts. When I asked the kids to share what they noticed in each of the perspectives, they came up with some awesome detailed observations.

***Funny Moment***

While the kids on the second day were making observations from the down perspective, I looked over at two of the boys who had been doing really well, to find that they had decided to use their sense of taste to make observations about the grass. They were on all fours, licking the grass like a cat lapping up milk.

Today, we had our first Discover Wildlife Journeys (DWJ) field trip of my term. About 100 6th graders from Ontario, Oregon came out to learn about being ornithologists. They participated in stations about water quality, adaptations, insects, and tracking. I ran the tracking station and facilitated a discussion with the kids about what types of tracks (signs of animals) there are before sharing a "track story". Initially, none of them knew what was going on in the track story, but after breaking down each of the aspects, they caught on and were able to figure out that it was a momma bobcat dragging something (prey or a baby) while one of her babies walked along side her.  I then explained how to identify tracks using a field guide and set them loose down one of the trails to find tracks both in the sand pits and stamped in the sidewalk along the trail. They all did a pretty good job of identifying the tracks, which is pretty neat.

How Neat Is That?!