In addition to offering field trips at the Preserve, the Foundation does additional types of education programs. One program is the annual Water Festival, which will be held on Tuesday, May 13th, 2025. It’s a full day of learning about water and water-related topics for all the 3rd and 4th graders in Kitsap County. The Foundation also hosts Family STEM nights where we encourage students to learn about environmental science.
Both Water Festival and a Family STEM night (Thursday, May 8th, 2025) are coming next month. Based upon past years’ experiences, we anticipate that students will be enthralled and delighted as they get to handle skulls, both real and replica, and feel the pelts of different animals. They will learn that you can tell a lot about where an animal lives by the kind of clothes they wear – animals that have very sleek fur, for example, spend a lot of time in the water. They also discover that animals with similar teeth have similar diets. Raccoons and bears have similar dentition and while their teeth are very different in size, they are both adapted to eat an omnivorous diet that is heavy on fruits, berries, and salmon. It’s a lot of fun to watch young people discover commonalities between different animals and learn about the diverse wildlife living in our forests and streams.
In addition to these programs, we also support learning through less common mechanisms. One is our partnership with Thistle Theater, supporting the creation of their educational puppet show “Big Tree Little Salmon.” I was privileged to attend a performance of this show with approximately 100 students in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. The students were packed into rows in their cafeteria, sitting on the polished cement floor. I was impressed to see the students so quiet, attentive, and deeply engrossed in the story of the salmon life cycle and how it affects the forest. One teacher remarked to me afterward that she hadn’t seen her students that quiet all year.
We hope to see you and your families at our educational events and, as always, we are happy to create a special field trip for local groups and schools. Read more about the Preserve in the Kitsap Sun.
– Katha Miller-Winder, President