Otter Creek Park is a great place for recreational activities. They have hiking trails, biking, horseback riding, camping, and even a shooting range for guns and archery. It is a beautiful location with over 2,000 acres set aside to preserve one of our most precious natural resources- water. But it is more than just a fun place to visit and enjoy the outdoors. There are many things we can learn from our interactions with nature, many ways to connect our classroom studies to our daily lives and encourage our children to get involved in their community.
Yes, I'm talking about field trips. I know how hard it can be to get one organized. There's all the paperwork, the need to apply it to state learning objectives, the parental permission forms, the transportation preparations, and the school funding. However, seeing our young people actively engaged in their studies and making connections is well worth the effort. As educators across the nation are struggling to improve test scores and retention of the basic foundations in learning, many schools are cutting out all the "extras", but these cut-backs seem to be doing more harm than good. Our children are disconnected and disengaged.
Many are trying to approach education in new ways, collaborating with other countries that are finding greater success in building a wise and knowledgable future, and one notable effort is the environmental education movement. Some schools are completely altering their educational perspective and finding ways to connect the disciplines across classrooms and across lives. Richard Louv coined the phrase "nature deficit disorder" to describe our increasingly disengaged youth and proposed that reconnecting with the land would increase attentiveness, awareness, and memory retention in our youth.
A great topic to facilitate this process of making connections when taking a field trip to Otter Creek Park would be erosion. There are places along the creek bed, without having to move too far along the trails, where students can see tree roots that have been exposed as the seasonal flood waters carried away the soil and limestone bluffs where they can witness erosion in action and even get a glimpse of fossilization. If your students bring their own journals, they can take notes about their observations, sketch their surroundings, and get engaged by asking questions. Erosion ties into water pollution, and this is a great opportunity to get children aware of their own water supply and how to get involved in water preservation efforts.
Teachers can tie in topics from other disciplines by having students read the works of nature enthusiasts like Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Aldo Leopold, writing their own poems or essays about nature, writing letters to their state government about water laws and regulations, immerse themselves in the natural history of Kentucky, practice math and geometry with maps and orienteering along the creek, and so much more. It is easier to bring everything together and give it meaning and purpose, when we can see the connections and how to utilize our newfound knowledge in our daily pursuits.
Comments