Field Trip!

It was 60 degrees today, the sky was the clearest blue, and we got to spend the whole morning outside tramping around in the Wetlands Park here. We had a field trip! Yea! Everyone was very excited! We finally managed to calm down enough to get out to the bus and sit down so the driver could get us there. I went with one of my fellow 4th grade teachers. The facility can only accomodate about 65 children at a time, and the bus only holds 75, so we divided up our grade level and scheduled two trips. The other classes will go on March 17th. We were lucky to even get any dates at all.

This is one of the most popular destinations here for elementary schools and they have limited openings. If you want your students to have this opportunity, you must call their office at 8:01 A.M. on the first day that teachers go back to work in August. This year, I temporarily lost attention, and didn't call until mid-morning....arrrgghhh! I was so relieved when there were still a couple of days open. Both of our dates were at the end of critical testing blocks, but we anticipated this trip and tested the traveling students first so they were finished for today. And the other team will be finished by their date, also. I'm sure the testing schedule is the only reason those two dates were still available.

Volunteer guides take us around the trails and really engage the students in "seeing" nature. Each student gets a field book and a pencil, a pair of binoculars, a magnifying lens and even a sling to secure their water bottle so their hands can be free to take notes and look at cool stuff. We get to keep the notebooks, but return the lenses, binocular and water bottle slings at the conclusion of the day. The whole concept is that the students are part of the NSI team: Nature Special Investigators (get it...like CSI?? It's the LAS VEGAS Wetlands Park...) You can actually see the skyline of the strip from the trails.

We had a blast. We saw tracks in the mud from racoons, bunnies and coyotes. We listened to quail calls, we saw a shrike perched on a bare tree. We picked apart dessicated coyote "scat" with sticks to look at the rabbit bone fragments and, in another pile, we found the seeds from the honey mesquite -- the coyote's diet when rabbits are scarce. We found owl pellets and rabbit droppings and watched three snowy egrets soar slowly over the cattails as they looked for a likely fishing spot. We examined a stick that had gnawing marks left by a beaver (there are 17 beaver living in this wetlands--who knew??) We watched a turtle swim and saw many American coots. (No, really, they are a bird--not old guys taking a walk muttering about young boys who need to pull up their jeans..) Mallards flew overhead and a hummingbird fluttered by. Whew, it was simply divine.

We were divided into groups of about 10 students and their accompanying adults. The group I attached myself to had four of my most squirrely dudes. These fellows have varying official diagnoses that have resulted in each having an IEP, daily meds, and invitations to the counselor's social skills groups. But I like each of them a lot. They are quite intelligent despite their unusual personalities, and are very sweet, and we're good friends. They were on fire today! We need to go somewhere like this everyday and learn and read and write while investigating the real world. Seriously---I'd like to take them to a fire station, or the electric generating plant, or the kitchen of a big restaurant. Anywhere where real life is occuring would be such a magnet for their curious, investigating natures. We could see things and figure them out and then go back and get books and read some more things and write authentically. They were right on the heels of our guide, pointing out interesting tidbits, answering her questions, coming up with really intriguing queries about the next new thing. Wow. We learned today. Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.