(education)

 

When you're of a certain age, it doesn't take long for the special charms of a rotting log to work their magic. "Oh, cool!" marvels eight-year-old Taylor Waldren. "A slug!" Never mind that it's fat and slippery; Taylor deftly scoops it up and drops it in his jar. A few feet away, at another gnarled, upturned log, Andy Thompson is carefully probing the sodden ground with a stick. "I got a millipede!" he yells out. All told, 10 keenly alert kids—from five to eight years old—have fanned out under a grove of towering birch and oak trees to make their own discoveries. They're like a band of miniature Indiana Joneses, many of them outfitted in safari shorts and vests and wide-brimmed hats. Though it's only 10:00 a.m., the summer sun and mosquitoes have already made their presence known. But the kids seem undaunted, busily hunting for spiders, centipedes, and all manner of creepy-crawlies.

Jim Hyatt, their teacher, has a lot to do with this. He's as much a 33-year-old overgrown kid as he is a naturalist and environmental educator. "Oh, Sam," Hyatt calls out mischievously to eight-year-old Sam Mendelson, who is in a contest with Taylor to see who can find the biggest, slimiest slug. Hyatt has beaten them both to the punch, and what he's proudly holding between his thumb and forefinger can only be described as a monster slug. "I'll give you five bucks to eat it," he says to Sam, who laughs at the challenge and soon proves himself no easy mark. All the kids circle closer together and start buzzing in anticipation. For effect, Hyatt pulls out a five-dollar bill and waves it back and forth. "Okay," Sam says evenly, "give me the five bucks first." Not one to be outsmarted by a mere grade-schooler, Hyatt says no can do. At this point Hannah Musickant, a petite seven-year-old in a blue skirt and pink sneakers, blurts out, "I'll eat it! I'll eat it!" Cheri Kose, an adult volunteer aide, can't resist joining in. "It's not lunchtime yet, Hannah," she says, and with that everyone busts out laughing.

Welcome to Bug Camp at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, an 185-acre ecological gem 15 minutes north of downtown Milwaukee. But don't be fooled by all the high jinks and gross-out contests; spend a day with Hyatt and the other teachers and you, too, will be able to spot a queen ant (there are no kings) and learn all the stages of an insect's life in one of the center's six ponds. You'll also learn the importance of decomposers to a forest ecosystem and find out how to tell the difference between a male and a female toad (it's all in the chirp). And, yes, you'll have a blast every step of the way.

"You can't stand up at a podium and lecture to them," says Hyatt, who has been teaching at the center for six years. "You have to go down to their level and make learning fun." Judging by how quickly these kids catch on—by lunchtime, they're identifying the butterflies flitting by—it's obvious the educators at the Schlitz center have hit on a winning formula.

The larger proof is that 37,000 kids pass through the doors every year, a majority of them from area schools. They're brought by their teachers for hands-on environmental-education classes. In fact, Schlitz's summer-camp programs—they include courses on everything from reptiles and fossils to wetland ecology—
constitute only a small part of the center's operation. (The Bones & Skulls class, which allows students to actually handle real skeletons, is a perennial favorite.) Each school year, hundreds of students—kindergartners through 12th graders—visit daily and are introduced to the wonders of nature and to ecological concepts by the center's staff of 18 professional environmental educators, making it one of the largest centers of its kind in the country.

These students are often from Milwaukee's most urbanized communities, and many of them have never seen Lake Michigan—which the center abuts—much less been out in the woods. "When small kids first come, they're often fearful," says Elizabeth "Buffy" Cheek, the center's director. "They see shady areas and big trees, and they think it's a jungle. If you ask some of these kids where their water comes from, they say the faucet; if you ask them where their food comes from, they say the store. They don't understand that nature supplies these things and that they are connected to nature."

For Hyatt and his fellow teachers at the center, the trick is to make that connection and at the same time put the kids at ease in the woods and dispel common myths about its more storied inhabitants. "You really have to engage them," he says, "so we'll use live animals, songs, stories, riddles—whatever it takes to get them going." At the same time, because many kids do not respond to abstract learning, says Cheek, "a lot of our teaching is sensory learning. It's hands-on touching, feeling, smelling, or anything that puts kids in direct contact with nature. If you pique their interest, then they continue learning on their own. So we provide the spark."

Before the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center was established in 1971, the property was known as the Nine Mile Farm, where the Schlitz Brewery draft horses once rested after days spent pulling the company's beer wagons. The magnificent landscape—a mix of prairies, forests, bluffs, ravines, ponds and lakeshore—is preserved today as a nature sanctuary that is home to several threatened and endangered species, such as the peregrine falcon and the Blandings turtle.

In 1973 the center started its environmental-education program and soon after became known for its innovative, experiential brand of ecological instruction. In time, summer family camp outs—featuring night walks and woodcock watches—would become favorites. High school biology teacher Stephen Laubach attributes his love of nature and his chosen vocation to the hands-on classes he attended at the center as a young boy. "I vividly remember the woodcock watch to this day," recalls Laubach, now 28, who has a master's degree in conservation biology. "A group of four to five families were all hiding behind bushes, and then all of a sudden these woodcocks would do this amazing mating dance, where they would fly straight up into the sky and then spiral down like a funnel to impress the females. They would make a very unique call and do these aerial displays just as the sun was setting."

As popular as these summer programs have become, it is the science and ecology instruction the center provides to regional schools that the center's staffers are most proud of. "We often fill a big gap in a school's curriculum," says Cheek, who points out that not every elementary school teacher is strong in natural sciences. That the center has a waiting list of schools that want to participate is testament to the staff's success. In fact, demand has shot up so high in recent years that the center is now in the process of building a new, $8.3 million facility that will provide much-needed additional classroom and exhibit space. (Its state-of-the-art "green" design includes the use of recycled building materials and incorporates solar and geothermal energy.)

"I call this salamander Starry Night," Jessy Biswell announces to her rapt audience, sitting in a circle on a grassy patch behind the center, as she holds up a blue-spotted salamander. At 26, Biswell is one of the youngest and most dazzling educators at Schlitz. Her own sense of wonder and her kinetic energy, like the blond curls that shoot out the back of her baseball cap, are irrepressible. Her enthusiasm is so contagious that when she trailed a frog into a pond last summer, some of the kids followed her in up to their knees.

For Bug Camp, Biswell gathers the kids after Hyatt has finished his Intro to Insects session. Her job is to show how bugs fit in to the ecosystem. That's where the slithery and scaly critters—borrowed from the center's indoor exhibit—come in. They are more than just props. After waxing eloquent about the "super-sticky goo" salamanders emit to ward off predators, Biswell moves on to the American toad, which she passes around to the group. "Don't worry—it won't give you warts," she says quickly, explaining that the toad's bumps are merely protective glands that secrete substances toxic to raccoons and other animals that try to eat it.

"What we're going to do now," she says at the end of the demonstration, "is catch bugs for these guys to eat." After handing out field lenses to the kids (they've already received their containers and a bug-collecting head start from Hyatt), Biswell leads them into another woody grove strewn with dead wood and all manner of productive decomposers. On the way in, she repeats a lesson in forest manners that Hyatt first gave earlier in the morning: "Remember, after turning over a log, before you move to another spot, you have to turn the log back. It's the roof on the bugs."

The best way to describe Biswell's methodology and appeal is to imagine a science geek, a 10-year-old child, and a stand-up comic rolled into one. She's fascinated by beetle larvae, awestruck by an ant colony, and gung ho about building a "slug city." Kids follow by example, so when Biswell looks under each log as if she's discovering a new world for the first time, you can see that spark of wonder being ignited throughout the group. Hannah, for example, is enthralled with the queen ant, and Josh Mendelson, Sam's five-year-old younger brother, is transfixed by some daddy longlegs spiders.

When Biswell periodically breaks the reverie to sprinkle in basic ecological concepts, it's done as a playful exercise to reinforce the learning. "Okay, listen up," she says at one point. "Repeat after me: It takes a flower to make a seed." The kids follow along in unison. Next, not missing a beat, she says, "The seed makes a flower," and again everyone duly repeats the line. Like a natural performer, Biswell then launches into a colorful riff on the act of pollination that captivates her listeners. As if to punctuate the grandeur of it all, she breaks out in a smile at the end and declares, "It's a noble thing." So, too, is the craft of an environmental educator.

For information on the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, call 414-352-2880 or log on to www.schlitzauduboncenter.com/.