It’s the time of year when we encourage you to reach out to us to schedule and plan a field trip at the Preserve. There are different options for field trips and learning experiences:
- Private, Guided Field Trips: Working with you or the leader of your group, we will tailor a field trip to fit your group’s interest. These can range from salmon education programs during the salmon spawning season to nature hikes, to finding unique ways to bring classroom curricula to the outdoors. For example, we recently did a Words-in-the-Woods field trip where we compared the sounds described in nature poems to the actual sounds of nature. We offer educational opportunities that you can customize to maximize your learning experience. Field trips are expected to align with appropriate learning standards, while still allowing flexibility to be creative and take novel approaches.
- Self-guided Family Field Trips: We have a resource bank of different types of educational field trips on our website. We love making outdoor education fun, and inspiring learners of all ages to become good stewards of our air, land, and water. We are pleased to offer downloadable resources for a wide range of indoor and outdoor learning activities.
- Classroom Learning Experiences: We have recently begun offering learning experiences that can take place in your classroom. These experiences can be adapted from the resources on our education resources page on our website or involve interpretive pelts and skulls that can be brought into the classroom to help students learn about animal adaptations, habitats, diets, and more.
It’s also a good time to remind all of you that the Foundation has a special awards program for transportation to the Preserve for school field trips. The form is available here. These awards align with our goal of fostering inclusiveness and greater equity in outdoor experiences.
As always, we ask that everyone follow our rules to ensure our salmon-bearing waterways aren’t disturbed and the Big Tree trail is kept intact.
We look forward to working with groups to plan and facilitate successful field trips this year!
– Katha Miller-Winder, President