“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
This week I met several groups of kids in a little patch of wildness at their school, looking for the various ways that plants make seeds, or, with younger ones, playing a game of “Food Chain” (no one was eaten, even during the wild rumpus). The kids know the place well, and many of them have explored the Ranger Circle, the Dark Forest, Maria’s Meadow, and other spots many times over several years at the private school.
My role is to channel some of their energy into new forms of discovery and understanding of what lives there. I can be a counterweight to a child’s fantasy about “poisonous” spiders or aggressive snakes, trying to replace such ideas with realistic caution and a sense that, overall, nature here is a safe place. I can invite them to think in new ways about animals in nature.
For example, the third and fourth graders know a lot of animals, but their knowledge of what the animal eats – and in turn what eats it – is limited. And so, in the “Food Chain” game, when we name one of the animals that the kids have seen there, a child who can name that critter’s predator or prey comes over to the “naturalist’s corner” and we ask about the next animal, until all the kids have come over to the naturalist’s corner.
But running around and exploring is part of it. When I sent the older kids out in groups of three or four, they sprang into the woods and fields as if shot from a slingshot. They scoured the place and came up with lots of wonderful examples of seeds. There were huge bur oak acorns with the stiff, curly fringe around the acorn cup. They found the small, dried pods of the partridge pea that was flowering just a couple of months ago. They noticed all the yellow, fleshy berries of horse nettle that we had talked about on an earlier outing. Yes, they look a little like tiny tomatoes, and they are even related (but poisonous). There were mimosa pods and the dark blue berries of privet, and I mentioned how invasive and destructive privet is in a place like this. They found seed heads of Indian grass and a couple of other grasses. One girl brought a sprig of juniper, so I mentioned that this species has separate male and female trees (and the sprig with the yellowish tips was from a male plant).
The younger kids were ready to run well before I was able to tell them what they should do. They would have been delighted to simply run. There was a lot of “wait, sit back down – no, you’ve got to stay with your group.” The instructions were as short as I could make them. “This group goes to this area, your group goes this way … and look for animals or signs that the animal was there, like a bird nest.” Then I sent them out. I might as well have said, “Let the wild rumpus start.” And kids started coming to me in excitement, “We found a bird nest! Also a beaver nest!” I had to see what this last really was, and they led me to some piled up brush someone had cut. That’s fine; the important thing was excitement about finding things. A spider web. A hole or burrow of some kind (armadillos had been digging in various spots). A dragonfly.
The trick which I do not claim to have mastered is to allow and even join a bit of wild rumpus while keeping things structured enough to accomplish what we set out to do. Some kids are quieter and are already locked in on the goal, and usually they bring a good bit of knowledge to the activity. For other kids, nature study is not on their “to do” list, but running and discharging energy is. I think that we won’t get anywhere without some kind of curiosity and joy, so I would never turn any of this into “nature boot camp.” Working with groups of kids gives me additional appreciation for what teachers do (and they do it every day, not occasionally as a volunteer).
But it’s great to hear a kid say they look forward to these outings, or ask hopefully if we’re going to “play that game again” (from last month, an activity drawn from Joseph Cornell’s book, Sharing Nature).
Our Lives In Nature 