For over ten years the annual Wild School event has been held at Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Middle school students from local schools including Davis-Thomas and Tucker Valley Elementary Middle Schools and Harman School in West Virginia have participated in the event.
Many different partner agencies, local non-profits, and volunteer organizations, including the long-standing and steadfast support of the Refuge’s friends group, Friends of the 500th, has supported the event and made it one to look forward to each year.
The refuge is instituting a change to the format this year. Changes are being made as a way to encourage outreach opportunities for the refuge staff and the Environmental Education committee, a committee of the Friends of the 500th. This is being done by including a series of classroom visits accompanied by an interactive learning activity. The in-classroom sessions will be conducted in January, February, and March 2015. These will be followed by a spring field trip to the refuge in April or May. This format change will better prepare the students for what they’ll see at the Refuge during their field trip.
This year Wild School’s topic will be Forests. On January 14, 2015, the in-classroom sessions kicked off at Davis-Thomas Elementary Middle School in Thomas, WV, where 30 sixth-graders from teacher A.J. Rapp’s science class learned about trees. Refuge biologist Dawn Washington, a forester herself, explained the different parts of a tree and led the discussion about the functions of these parts.
EE committeee members Andy Dalton and Marilyn Shoenfeld organized and led a Tree Factory activity drawn from Project Learning Tree’s activity guide. Students were asked to act out the roles of various parts of the tree including heartwood, phloem, xylem, cambium, bark, roots, and leaves. They took to their roles as tree parts and went right to work slurping nutrients, photosynthesizing, making new cells, and anchoring the tree in the ground.
Next stop will be Bob Jones’s science classes at Tucker Valley Elementary Middle School where around 60 kids will be participating in the in-classroom session.
For more information on Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge visit our website at http://www.fws.gov/refuge/canaan_valley/ or the refuge’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/canaanvalleynwr?ref=hl.
