Outdoor school day makes headlines

Mikayla Reuter, 11, was not in her regular classroom at Miller Elementary on a recent Tuesday morning. Instead, she knelt by the edge of Tumalo Creek looking for bugs. Mikayla was one of close to 100 Miller Elementary fourth- and fifth-grade students participating in a daylong program of environmental science discovery and exploration at the Skyliner Lodge site in Bend on May 25.

“[Bugs are] good because they feed the fish, and they also help give nutrients to the water,” Mikayla said as she surveyed the rushing stream. “Tumalo Creek is the main resource of the water we get. We drink the water in this creek. If it's dirty, the fish could get sick, and we could get sick, and it could just affect the whole ecosystem,” she said, explaining a concept she had been taught in the classroom all year and was now getting a chance to discover for herself. Students from the fourth- and fifth-grade blend classrooms of teachers Julie Stirling, Erin Kerr and Bert Gottschalk spent the brisk May day exploring environmental science. Students played games to learn about forestry, took a hike focused on sensory awareness to discover a sense of place in the outdoors and clambered around the rocky shores of Tumalo Creek to discover facts about its watershed.
The program was put on by the Environmental Center, a Bend nonprofit dedicated to promoting sustainability in Central Oregon. Denise Rowcroft, a sustainability educator at the Environmental Center, said she and her colleague, Jackie Wilson, had given classroom presentations on environmental science and sustainability to these students all year. “We'll do a series of these programs that start in October and go straight through May,” Rowcroft said. The day-long outdoor school was the culmination of that program, Rowcroft said.

“The mission of The Environmental Center is to embed sustainability into daily life in Central Oregon, and we see getting kids outside as one of the fundamental ways of that happening,” she said. Rowcroft said teaching scientific inquiry was only one part of the plan for the day. “The purpose is to immerse them in the outdoors and for them to have direct experience,” Rowcroft said. “It's less focused on science and more focused on having fun and being in the outdoors.” Gottschalk, who has been teaching in Bend for almost 17 years, said a hands-on day like this was the best thing for his students. “For this age,” he said, “this is how these kids learn. This is how they internalize and use it in their everyday lives.” For each of the three activities, students were given some basic guidance and then encouraged to explore on their own. “The beauty of science inquiry is you throw the question out there, and then you let the kids find
the answer,” Gottschalk said. “A lot of times the teachers and the adults have to step away from it.”

On the banks of Tumalo Creek, Allison Dickerson, a volunteer from the Tourism and Outdoor Leadership Program at Oregon State University-Cascade Campus, gave students a chart with pictures of various water bugs that lived in water with zero pollution, water with some pollution and water with heavy pollution. After finding and identifying some bugs, students were asked to look at their charts to see if the bugs they found seemed to indicate how healthy the stream was. Mikayla said she had found a caddisfly larva which she thought indicated the creek was pretty clean. “Stoneflies, caddisflies — they can only live in really, really clean water,” Mikayla said. Upstream from Mikayla, Jane Jones, 10, and Riley Oleson, 11, were peering through a plastic field- microscope at their catch. “We looked at our chart, and we think it's this one,” Jane said as both girls pointed at a drawing of a damselfly nymph on their chart. “We debated with it being a stonefly,” Jane said. “But it has a more skinny body that the stonefly does, and its legs are all floppy,” Riley added. Both girls said they were enjoying their day of outdoor learning. “If we were at school, they'd just be telling us about it,” Jane said, “but here we're observing it.”