Originally appears in the Fall 2005 issue

A crowd of kids swirled around the nature center exhibit table, grabbing up pinecones, beaver-chewed sticks, deer skulls. They were pursued by a harried chaperone, protesting: “Boys and girls! Please! Put those down! Don’t you see the sign?” No one paid attention as she pointed to the small wooden sign on the side of the exhibit. She took a deep breath and proclaimed, “Boys and girls! Where are our manners? It says, PLEASE DON’T TOUCH!”

And the students, obedient and unsurprised, put the things down. They wandered over to glance at the glassed-in exhibits, hands in their pockets, and then trickled away, and the door slammed behind them. I could hear the chaperone bellowing, “Walk! Walk!” as the students raced for the bus.

You can’t blame the chaperone: it’s a dirty job, and she’d already had a long bus ride, dispensed half a dozen doses of Ritalin, and taken a two-hour nature walk in the October drizzle. But when the crowd had dispersed I went over and looked at the sign again, just to make sure. And it read, of course, as it always has: PLEASE TOUCH.

Think of an infant, learning about the world. Show any object to a baby and what happens? The baby grabs it, pops it in his mouth, smells it, rubs it, bangs it, pinches it. Babies are born wanting to explore with all their senses. They learn by yanking down curtains, eating bugs, tasting electrical cords, tangling their hands in your hair and trying to rip your ears off. Parents, understandably, seek to curb these impulses. “No, no, don’t touch,” they say. Schools continue the trend of turning tactile learners into auditory and visual ones. Remember the warnings before every field trip you ever took? “You look with your eyes, boys and girls. Please don’t touch.”

Students learn this lesson well. Children arrive at the center for a nature walk, having been carefully cautioned by parents and teachers against touching anything. But by the time they’re out of kindergarten, the warnings are unnecessary. I hold up a spruce cone, my fingers sticky with spicy sap, and talk about red squirrels. The students listen, maybe, but no one stoops to pick up a cone. It might have germs, it might have rabies. It might bite. And then there’s the computer, the ultimate glass wall between children and the real world. Computers open doors and create bridges between human minds. But computers present learners with only an image of the world, not the world itself.

We who call ourselves environmental educators should ponder all this. How do we best teach students about the natural world? Every time you put together a lesson plan, lead a walk, teach a class, consider this important question: Are you using real stuff?

I wish I had a nickel for every environmental education activity that involves index cards. Students drown in a sea of paper. My kindergartener brings home a fistful of worksheets every single school day. By the end of the year, the pile is as high as he is. Are you doing activities with pictures cut out from magazines and glued onto index cards? You know who you are.

Even aside from the sea of paper, many environmental programs use simulation games and activities that could be as easily done in the gym as in the great outdoors. While these activities can be a good complement to “real stuff,” many educators mistake the simulation for the experience itself: “Sure we go outdoors to study nature. We just played Predator-Prey Hopscotch in the parking lot.”

Are you demonstrating a wetlands food chain with pictures of cattails and duckweed? Use real stuff! Get a cattail from the marsh, wave it around in the classroom, and watch the brown velvet sausage explode into a cotton-candy cloud of seeds. Dredge some foul-smelling mud from the nearest swamp, put it in a plastic basin, and let the students feel the slimy algae and dig for sowbugs.

You don’t have to have access to wilderness; it works in the city, too. Studying plant parts? Ban pictures cut out of magazines! Yank a dandelion up by the roots and dissect it. Studying predator-prey relationships? I defy you to find a building that doesn’t have a spider and a fly in it somewhere: observe predation at work in the corner of your classroom as the spider traps a fly. Studying water conservation for Earth Day? Take the kids into the school bathroom, run the faucets, and use a stopwatch to see how long it takes to fill up a gallon jug. Flush the toilet! Use real stuff.

Where to get real stuff, though, that’s the question. Some of it you can buy. There are companies that sell skulls, everything from aardvark to zebra. Invest in a muskrat skull, and feel the sharpness of the bright orange incisors. Buy a coyote skull so that your students can run their fingers over the meat-tearing canines. There are other places that sell real owl pellets, made of regurgitated rodent fur, packed with real bones. Rip into that mouse fur. If pellets and skulls aren’t cheap enough for your budget, there’s a world of free “real stuff” just outside your door. Many real specimens cannot be purchased for any money. There’s nowhere I know of that you can buy a goldenrod ball gall or a paper wasp nest. You just have to go out and find them. Be aware that provincial, state, and federal laws protect many species of plants and animals, and you may not possess protected materials without the proper permits and licenses. All birds (with a few non-native exceptions) are protected, and this includes nests, eggs, and feathers. So clearly a birds’ egg collection is legally — and ethically — out of the question. But I’m talking about common, non-protected stuff: leaves from backyard trees, squirrel-gnawed nuts, ladybugs, seeds from the hardy plants that claw their way up out of the cracks in the sidewalk. The price is right.

This is dangerous advice, I warn you. It will win you no brownie points with custodians, administrators, principals. Cattail fluff and mouse fur are darned hard to get out of the carpet. Do it anyway.

I was once teaching a class about wildlife food chains, lecturing away, and informed the mildly bored students that foxes ate mice. A small girl in the front row raised her hand. “Foxes eat mice?” she inquired, eyebrows raised. “How do you know?”

“Well, they just do. I read it in a book,” I replied lamely.

“Ah, but how do you know,” she insisted shrewdly. “Did you ever see a fox eat a mouse?” And she really had me there.

Now, after teaching a lesson on predator-prey relationships, using owl pellets, I ask students how many rodent skulls are found in an average pellet. “Two,” they chorus, brushing the mouse fur from their dirty fingers.

“Ah,” I reply. “And how do you know?”

 

Real Stuff Shopping List 

Dirt: A shovelful of soil, worms and all, spread out on newspaper, is full of subtle signs of life that can be observed with a hand lens.

Snow: Take a quick field trip outside on a cold day to collect a bucket of snow. Melt it and see how the volume shrinks amazingly! Then filter it to see if the snowflakes picked up any particulate matter on their way down.

Weeds: Uproot a dandelion or other non-native wildflower to dissect, and study adaptations: a flat rosette of leaves to shade out competition, a deep taproot to reach water in dry spells, or the wonderful wandering seeds.

Water: Collect a bucketful of water from the local pond, lake, or mud puddle, to be observed with hand lenses. Organisms in a freshwater pond can number in the billions.

Bug Houses: Look for abandoned nests of insects such as paper wasps or mud daubers attached to the school building, under eaves and on windowsills. Wait until after a hard freeze to bring them indoors, as all the inhabitants will be killed by a good frost.

Sticks: Bring twigs from winter trees and shrubs indoors, put them in water, and watch them begin to bud.

Skulls and owl pellets: The following companies offer sterilized specimens suitable for classroom use.

Canada

Ward’s Natural Science of Canada, 397 Vansickle Road, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3T5, 1-800-387-7822, <www.wardsci.com>. Natural and replica skulls and skeletons, owl pellets.

United States

Acorn Naturalists, 155 El Camino Real, Tustin, CA 92780, 1-800-422-8886, <www.acornnaturalists.com>. Replica skulls and owl pellets.

Pellets, Inc., PO Box 5484, Bellingham, WA 98227-5484, 1-888-466-OWLS, <www.pelletsinc.com>. Owl pellets.

Skulls Unlimited International, 10313 South Sunnylane, Oklahoma City, OK 73160, <www.skullsunlimited.com>, 1-800-659-SKULL. Real and replica skulls and skeletons. Their fascinating catalogue notes that “all natural bone specimens are legally and ethically obtained; no animals are destroyed solely for the purpose of obtaining osteological specimens.”

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Anita Sanchez is the Senior Environmental Educator at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Five Rivers Environmental Education Center in Delmar, New York.