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On Display: "Sweet Season" Exhibit Featuring Kate Wilcox

March 12, 2024

The exhibit is open to visitors through the end of April.

Outdoor Education for New American Middle Schoolers

Linden Rayton | October 4, 2019

On a cloudy but warm Thursday recently, I met seven 6th-8th grade English Language Learning (ELL) students and their two teachers from Rundlett Middle School here at the Conservation Center. It was the first session of a pilot program with several exciting goals: to introduce our local ELL students, most often coming to Concord from central Africa, Nepal and Bhutan, to their new nature; explore various STEM concepts through outdoor lessons; and to use these outdoor experiences to frame writing activities back at school.

So here we were today to use our engineering skills to build some boats from natural materials and set them free in the river while observing river dynamics, using words and concepts like “float, sink, heavy, light.” At least, that was our plan. Alas, we were to find that the Merrimack was not going to provide much of any “river dynamics” this day, but despite that our group had a great time.

We took our time traveling out to the river, several students laughing at me as I tried to pronounce their names correctly. I covered my name tag and turned it back on them- none of them could remember my name either. We stopped to examine mushrooms and pull them apart to look for maggots. “Can you eat these?” the students asked. I showed them the many small worms eating the inside of the mushroom and, over a few squeals of disgust, said, “Not these ones!”

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On one of the flat river bank areas currently exposed by the low river levels, I had staged a number of items: thin, flexible bittersweet vines, some paper birch bark, small strong sticks and twigs, and partially-decomposed branch pieces. These were our boat-building supplies. This is an activity I’ve been doing since I was little. I think my parents taught me but I’m not sure where exactly I picked this up. The basics of a successful boat are this: you find a piece of soft, partially decomposed branch. You test it out to see which way floats up (a critical step). You stick a tall twig in a squishy area as your mast. You thread a leaf or two onto the mast to serve as sails. Then you release your boat!

Almost everyone I’ve ever taught how to do this loves it. It is so satisfying to build your boat and then watch it stream away from you. The kids foraged for some of their own materials and then got down to building.

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Our boats floated admirably- but didn’t go anywhere. There was hardly any current to take them away from us, something which deflated me a little bit but didn’t seem to affect the students much. They cheered, waded in the water, were silly or very serious as their preferences led them. It was hard for me to tell whether they had enjoyed the overall experience or not, but one major clue told me they did: they talked! If middle schoolers answer your questions, and then talk to you while you walk back on the trails, generally your lesson has been a success. Later their teacher confirmed that they all had a wonderful time and couldn’t wait to come back.

And come back they will, in October, May and June. Next up is leaves and trees. We will make leaf “color charts” to demonstrate the autumn progression of leaf pigments; do some bark and leaf rubbings; choose a small tree to do some measurements and observe the late fall atmosphere at the Conservation Center. Hopefully we’ll find a time for me to visit them at school and see some of their writing projects. I think our first session of this pilot project was very successful, and I am looking forward to seeing them again in a few weeks!

New Americans, Old River

Dave Anderson | July 29, 2018

“I’ll bet a kid from rural Africa could teach you a thing or two about making things out of trees” my colleague said.

It's true.

The summer students from Concord’s Broken Ground Elementary School, located only one mile from the Forest Society Conservation Center visited our Merrimack River Outdoor Education Area for a guided walk - and more importantly - for unstructured free play at the edge of the Merrimack River.

The 12 elementary students are "New Americans," most from families relocated to the Concord area recently by social service agencies with support from area churches. They are enrolled in the English Language Learners program. Their home countries include Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and Nepal.

Two of their five teachers: Alex Crosby and Ellen Kenny, a talented nature photographer, are each familiar with the floodplain. We discussed a field trip: an hour at most for walking and teaching about wildlife and forests which the students interchangeably called a “jungle.”

Our destination was the mouth of Mill Brook, a sandbar at Eastman Cove where a shallow river oxbow meanders east before rejoining the main stem of the Merrimack opposite the NH Technical Institute. The forest here comprises silver maple, a supple tree adapted to grow in sandy-silt and able to withstand ice blocks and the dynamics of seasonal floods. Silver maple is a true native “riparian” (meaning riverside) forest type.

Our plan was to allow an hour at least for wading and free play in the river.

These students, whom others may call “refugees,” ARE different from their American counterparts. Beyond working to learn basic English, they’ve not (yet) forgotten how to play unfettered outdoors. Without stern parental warnings and a structured or scientific approach to plants and animals, I saw the students using their five senses, touching and climbing and eager to experience - and to share. They are tactile learners, wanting to touch plants and trees and sand and water. We talked about poison ivy and showed them which plant.

A teacher related how on another field trip, students were sternly instructed to not touch any trees. “I mean, why not?” she said. Exactly.

I too had some things to remember: finding toads, climbing trees, eating sour cherries, the bitter smell of a pin cherry’s inner bark, finding hickory nuts, oak galls and pine cones and looking closely at leaves and finding inchworms.

I also remembered a short poem “Witness” by poet W.S. Merwin:

I want to tell what the forests were like

I will have to speak in a forgotten language.

- from The Rain In The Trees (1988)

Teacher Ellen Kenny shared how her students relate to plants – not as a kind of green wall or backdrop – but as potential sources of food or medicine. As we walked students exclaimed “bamboo” when we found the segmented stems of scouring rush. They told me how large it grows in their home country and how it can be used for building homes.

Kenny adds “there are usually two or three Nepali girls who are familiar with many of the plants—ferns or plaintain—because ‘In Nepal we eat that one! And that one! Sometime we find here and we pick and eat here too!’ They interact with plants like they were old friends."

A girl spied green milkweed pods and talked of picking them and playing at floating them in a river because they resemble green fish. Kenney adds “No plastic floaties or swim toys: just milkweed pods.” To her students, plants have utility – each plant has a potential use. The kids seem to me to pay closer attention to plants than American kids.

They expressed fewer fears about being outside. I am accustomed to hearing a litany of hazards: mosquitoes, ticks, poison ivy, poison sumac, snakes, spiders, bears. The lack of a New Hampshire equivalent of elephants, lions or tigers presented me with an opportunity to explain the worst we fear are ticks and mosquitoes. Using bug spray mitigates the risk.

Soon, the perceived “danger” stories turned to snakes – because I had asked. They obliged with tales of snakes inhabiting their homelands. I countered with the fact that our common garter snakes are harmless.

At the river, the students did not hesitate to wade into the shallow, sandy-bottomed cove. Running, laughing and splashing or flopping in the water ensued. We found freshwater mussels. “Shells!” students enthused. We talked about mussels as potential food. Soon students had collected half a bushel. “You stimulated a hunting and gathering impulse” offered Kenny.

A half-sunken log became a submersible couch and a boat. Blue flowers of pickerel weed were a place to hunt for insects or frogs. Boys pursued feats of strength and speed. Girls splashed and followed a teacher to search for tiny fish and to see a neon blue damselfly. Another student stayed on the bank building roads and walls of sand while another played at floating logs and removing others, clearing driftwood “like a beaver in reverse” offered one teacher.

We didn’t drag any curriculum guides or formal cookbook lesson plans. On this perfect summer morning in one all-too-brief hour, we created an eddy in the river, a place to play and learn and to share. A student asked if I could “teach him a dance.” A dance of pure joy would have been appropriate. I watched New American children experiencing the Merrimack – the central river of their new home. We shared the opportunity to play and ask questions but it would soon be time to meet the bus…

After collecting sandals and T-shirts from the sandy bank, we gathered for a snack and sat in a circle on the riverbank while looking at the Concord granite quarry, forested hills, the sky - a time to share - so I asked “What’s the name of this river? Where is it going? Where does it come from?” They looked at me; didn’t know.

“What do you hear?” We listened to birdsongs and the sound of traffic on I-93 beyond the trees. Then I told them this is the Merrimack River – it comes from the vast forest of the White Mountains. It flows to the Atlantic Ocean at Newburyport, Mass.

What do you like best about this river? I asked. Hands raised. “It is calm,” meaning (I assume) peaceful in the feeling of sitting next to the river as opposed to tumultuous in its cataracts or currents. Both “swimming” and “finding shells” also rated high.

Then I asked, “Can you tell me about a river in your homeland?” Softly, the students shared stories of remembered places: gathering water to wash bodies or to shower or wash clothing, a place to catch fish for food. A place to swim. One girl told me about crocodiles in the river. But no, not here. These children had already known other rivers.

Welcome to the jungle. I wonder if these kids will always relate naturally to forests, plants, animals and a river. Do they hold up a figurative mirror to their peers who, in my experience, would have likely been less comfortable turned loose to wade and explore, without formal, structured learning activities?

Teacher Kenny explained the value of field trips for English Language Learners:

“Many new American children have sophisticated areas of competency, survival skills, a comfort level in the forest and an understanding of foraging and even living off the land that we do not often get to see—that is not elicited by regular classroom academics-- and we would not likely have discovered, had we NOT had the opportunity to bring them to wild places and watch them roam and explore.

"How unusual for them—and how wonderful—is the opportunity to show us what they can do and what they know, that so many of us do not: about ways to be in and to interact with and understand our—and now their—woods.”

With nearly 30 years’ experience now as a naturalist and environmental educator, I can't imagine a more age-appropriate and immersive experience for learning about a floodplain forest and its river.

It was perhaps the highest and best use of the Concord conservation land that I've ever witnessed.

Naturalist Dave Anderson is senior director of education for The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. Reach him at danderson@forestsociety.org.

Photos by Emily Lord/Forest Society.

Originally published in the New Hampshire Sunday News