Just got home after volunteering with my local Audubon chapter Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society at a local elementary school and thought I would do a little post about the experience before I go to class.
Last year I trained to be a docent in the Wetlands Discovery Program with SCVAS, which just had it's 30 year anniversary last week. I did not end up being able to participate in the program beyond the training because I started a new job that clashed with the hours, and because it is a seasonal program I had to wait a year until they started again.
The program goal is to get kids in third through six grade interested in the local wetlands of the San Francisco Bay, of which about 90% has been lost due to urban development (we got former landfill, salt ponds, and companies like Google, Yahoo, and Lockheed practically on the water).
The program consists of two parts: an in-class portion that occurs one day, and a field trip portion that occurs another day later in the week. Today I participated in the in-class portion at an elementary school about a mile down the street from me.
I did not take any photos (privacy and all that), but I wish I could show some of the materials we have. We create stations for kids on different topics with posters that correspond to sections on a worksheet, and the kids work their way around the classroom. Some of the stations were feather identification, changes to the SF wetlands over the past 100 years, wetland plant identification, migration, and wetland uses.
The classes we worked with today were all third graders (around eight years old). Besides my previous work in special needs classrooms with primarily nonverbal kids on the autism spectrum, I am really only used to working with kids that young one-on-one in a therapy setting, so I was a little nervous at the start of the class. That anxiety quickly went away once we started the activity and I felt much more comfortable working with the kids in groups of two to four at each station.
Normally the stations are set-up in the cafeteria, like in this photo from the SCVAS website, but today we had to do it in one of the classrooms so it was a lot more crowded.
The kids did well and did not require much redirection. I was surprised at how well the teacher had prepared them for material and could tell they had already had some foundation in the topic.
After the worksheets, we did binocular training. We went outside to the field for the bino training and each of the three of us led our own groups. Definitely a lot more redirection needed during this part of the program. We went over rules of using the binoculars (don't look at people, don't walk/run while looking, keep strap around your neck, don't look at the sun...etc) and then we did the hands on training. I taught the kids how to adjust the binoculars for their face and how to focus on objects near and far. Some of the kids were unclear about the idea of a fixed magnification and were asking how to "zoom," so I had to explain the focusing part a few times. We practiced looking at a redwood tree at the end of the field and then looking at a fence that was much closer, and then they had a few minutes to look around and practice on their own. A lot of planes could be seen taking off, so I often pointed those out and encouraged the kids to practice lifting up the binoculars and finding a moving object.
field portion, from the SCVAS website
It was a nice, easy experience that I enjoyed. I would like to participate in the field trip portion later this week, but I will hopefully be working (I am behind on hours this week).
And with that, I will be making myself some lunch and then heading to my animal behavior class. Thanks for reading :)