Pilot

Teaching about wolves!

The last week has been a whirlwind of events! As I mentioned in my previous post, I was heading to pilot TWA's new presentations for a few groups. It had already been almost 6 months ago that I made these plans to pilot the programming, so I feel a sense of relief and sadness now that it is over.
The piloting took place in my home town of Sheboygan, WI through five different opportunities, these included giving a program to:

• Camp Y-Koda Day Camp Ages 6-7: 1 hour
• Camp Y-Koda Day Camp Ages 8-12: 1 hour 
• Maywood EcoCamp Ages 8-14: 1 hour 
• Maywood Adult Program: 1 hour
• Camp Evelyn Ages 8-17: 1 hour

Before I left I did a lot of planning to prepare for the Camp Y-Koda groups. With an hour to do programming, I was able to spend about 30 minutes doing the PowerPoint presentation, with intermixed inter-activeness to supplement the presentation, along with a few activities. As a teacher, I want to make sure kids are engaged in all activities supplement and reinforce learning, so I was very deliberate in my choosing. In the end I decided to do a predator-prey game, wolf 

Teaching our Community About Wolves

sensing activity and telemetry demonstrations. I had spent the most time prepping the wolf sensing activity, which involved kids have a certain "smell" that they had to follow by smelling sponges to see if it matched their own scent. I am glad I had the older group of campers first, because I realized it was actually really challenging even for them. This allowed me to quickly change my approach for the younger group! Any time people are working with others, you have to be able to adjust and in this instance I knew that to best meet the kids learning needs, I had to do just that. This is why environmental education is not just doing activities or 'talking' at students, but its also understanding developmental appropriateness, what is working and not working, and being able to read a group.

When I heard a lot of my classmates saying they had education parts to their projects, it worried me. Education is not something anyone can do, even though current conversations degrade the training of teachers. To be a good educator you do have to know your content, which all

Wolf Track Plaster Casts

of my cohort can accomplish, but that is not even close to the challenge that educators face. Its about how do you get people to understand what you are trying to convey; is it at their level, is it engaging... I could go on and on about the number of things an educator truing has to consider when implementing and developing programming. So on that note, the program with Camp Y-Koda went really well because I had time reinforce ideas through interactive, hands-on activities.

Which led me to my Maywood adventures! Here I was given 30 minutes to meet with each group. With that being said, it was no enough time. I went through my PowerPoint and did a lot of questioning to increase engagement and did a few short demonstrations. I felt I was doing a bit of injustice to these groups with the time I had. Part of me didn't even want to do the PowerPoint presentation, however, that is what was asked of me specifically in doing my project with TWA, so I felt as if it was needed for the piloting. That being said, I did change a few things based on my presenting with the groups. One in particular was an ecology/tropic cascade slide. After doing the Camp Y-Koda presentations, I realized that there is no simple way to explain and convey these concepts. I will talk about predator-prey relationships, but not full ecology. This still fits the educational standards for science, so I felt as if removing the slide was justifiable as not developmentally appropriate.

Boothing event at Family Night at Camp Y-Koda

The part I was most nervous about was my adult presentation! I practiced to my parents about 5 times! Adults, unlike kids, have more complicated questions and a better understanding of their own wolf opinions and knowledge. This is intimidating. However, it happened and I survived! I think it went really well! I also did a short phone activity with them to see the differing opinions of the group. It was really interesting because the first question was if the ecosystem benefits by wolves, everyone agreed. Science does too! But when we got to "I think wolves should be hunted" or "I think wolves should be listed as endangered" there was a wide spectrum of responses from the group! So even people who 'like' wolves, have very differing opinions. One woman said she really liked this. It was a preamble to my 30 minute presentation.

During my last presentation with Camp Evelyn, I had a group ranging from 8 to 17. This was unknown to me before arriving, so I was a bit surprised. I already split off the younger kids, but then I had to adjust my presentation for this age range. Basically I had to be able to reach the younger levels. As I have a completely different presentation for middle and high schoolers, I could not use it because it really goes into a lot of social issues and controversies of wolves, that 8 year old kids are just not ready for. But I noticed the older kids being un-engaged and let the younger kids take over my questions and hands-on activities. I really don't blame them, this was not a presentation for them. This experience reiterated what I had thought all along that there needed to be tiered presentation. Believe it or not, prior to me creating one... the same visual presentation was used for all ages.

Finally, a last thought.... Plaster casts with kids, as an art project, is very difficult!