March 6, 2002
Class explores great outdoors
Students romp and roam as they study nature in winter
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Students in the sixth through eighth grade village at the Traverse Bay Community School have spent the winter immersing themselves in the natural world.
Romping and roaming on the school's 440-acre campus, the 28 students all take part in the Exploring Nature in Winter class
"It's been nice, one of our main goals was to get the kids outside in the winter exploring around and give them a better awareness of nature," said Ned Milne, who co-teaches the class with its creator, Mae DeBruyn. "The thing I've been the most impressed with is how well the kids work and play together. Kids will work together that normally wouldn't expect to."
Some of the activities in the class include animal tracking, looking at trees and leaves in the winter to discern how they adapt and winter survival skills.
"We have a little twist of winter survival with teambuilding thrown in where we did a day two or three weeks ago that divided the students into groups and gave each group three matches," said Milne. "They could not use any paper and had to find little twigs and keep a fire going for three minutes. Every group did it and they didn't even use all their matches. Of course, some of them were Boy Scouts."
For the students enrolled, it is an enjoyable way to have a hands-on look at nature.
"We get to do a lot of interesting things like learn about animals and their tracks," said John Oswalt, a sixth-grade student in the class. "We've tracked deer, raccoons and rabbits."
The twice-weekly class had students playing a predator-prey game last Thursday afternoon. To start the game, Milne chose five students to be predators and designated the other 22 as prey. The prey donned a small flag, like in flag football, and had to cross a field to get to their food. They had to evade predators along the way, get their food (colored pieces of paper) and return to the beginning safe zone. To survive a round, they had to do this three times.
The predators, meanwhile, tried to grab the flags of the prey to capture them and remove them from the round. A predator survived a round by capturing two prey.
As the kids scrambled around the field in a wild melee, with the prey desperately heading for a safe zone and predators in fast pursuit, a few strategic points came out.
For the prey: speed is a good thing, especially to elude capture. It helps to run when other prey distracts a predator and to use the safe zones scattered on the field. A few snowballs in the hands of one player mimicked the defensive strategies of some prey and allowed safe passage across the field.
For the predators: plan your attack and look for weaker victims.
"I was a predator two times," said Rebekah Bland, an eighth grade student. "You just have to stop and think and see who's slow so you can catch them."
The advantage initially seemed to be for the predators, whose ranks swelled from an initial five to 15 by the second round. Then too many predators competing for too few prey made the going tougher. By the third and final round, there were only nine predators remaining.
"This reflects how dynamic ecological systems are," Milne said. "There is a constant change and fluctuation in nature, depending on some of the sorts of things we're dealing with like the food and shelter and predators."
"I think the kids are starting to understand there are constant change happening in nature."