Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Kids in the Woods

For the past 2 or 3 weeks I’ve been making tons of weekend trips to Big Lake. Why? It’s a program called Kids in the Woods. It’s an educational program to teach about the forest and things related to nature. We did many things in it Thursday to Saturday.

The first time we did it, we brought along my friend Josh Bell. Our study that day was on Earth Manners. Pretty much it taught us to be considerate to Planet Earth. We had to take a hike on the Big Lake Vistor Center Nature Trail. We enjoyed the hike a lot. We ate and went back home.

The next day we wanted to see the Native American dancers. When we got there, we were the only people other than the 2 rangers at the BLVC. They cancelled the 10 a.m. dance. Then we went to hike. When we came back for the 2 p.m. dance, the dancers didn’t show! My mom said to one of the rangers, Jay, “Start pluckin’ feathers and start dancing!”. We all laughed. Even I laughed, and I didn’t think it was funny!

We came back the next day for the speech on the Mexican Grey Wolf. Again, we were the only people there. Now, you may think the ranger was tutoring me on wolves. Guess again. I knew the answer to pretty much every question he asked. Not every question, but most. We joked around and he said I should do the speech.

We came back at 2 p.m. for Camping with Bears. The lady there taught us about bears. We played a little game where we have 6 people divided and placed in 3 hula-hoops. The hoops were habitats and we were the bears. She said we had to change habitats because a forest fire started. We then moved to a smaller habitat. We had to move AGAIN because a big building was being built smack-dab in our habitats. We moved from a small hoop to a smaller plate! There wasn’t enough room for 2 “bears” per habitat, so 1 bear from each habitat had to either “die” or moved to a very bad habitat. It was fun, but sad.

The next week we went to a game of Forest Frisbee. It was fun, but sadly, I got one of the highest scores, which isn’t good in Forest Frisbee. We went through 18 holes, and the guy who helped run the game was the “flag”, which meant he showed us were the goals were.

Afterwards we got prizes. While we were picking prizes I got to know a kid named Nick. He was a nice guy. I really liked him.

The next day we went to a program called Transformers of the Forest. We enjoyed it a lot. It was all about frogs and how frogs are like Transformers. We then went on a hike around Big Lake. When we came back, they were about to start a program on rocks. We learned about rocks, the Rock Cycle, made a model volcano erupt, and took a hike to find petrified wood. I was pretty much Bad Luck Ben. I couldn’t find one thing of petrified wood if my life depended on it.


You can probably see what the Kids in the Woods program is like, I hope. If you are in Eagar, you can see the Kids in the Woods program at the BLVC. It lasts May to August every year.
Hope you enjoyed!