Creepy, Crawly, Leafy, and Furry: Learning about Life through a Hands-on Camping Experience

All children enjoy exploring and observing animals, insects, plants, flowers, trees, and dirt. This interdisciplinary unit ties together many objectives in the second grade Standard Course of Study in the subjects of language arts, science, math and social studies. It will touch the lives of forty or more children each year for many years to come. It will help teachers in a district where 75% of the children are on free-reduced lunch. What better way to teach these objectives than through a real-life, hands-on experience that incorporates something that all children love in life--"The Great Outdoors!" We would like to provide our young naturalists with the opportunity to go on camping trips and learn about nature without ever having to leave the school grounds. Many of our children often have very little experience with the great outdoors. The majority of our stdents live in single-parent homes in areas that are predominately socio-economically deprived. The parents of these children have difficulty getting time away from work as well as having the extra resources to provide their children with a camping adventure. In the classroom library we will set up a mock camp site complete with tents, chairs, and other campsite equipment. The children can relax on a bean bag stump while reading all about the numerous species of plants in our world. At other times, they can explore the vast insect population while being camouflaged in the belly of a ladybug (tent). We would like to build a non-fiction section complete with Ranger Rick and Big Backyard magazines. With this literature we will have the children researching various plant and animal lifecycles. We will also incorporate the school grounds as a daylight camping experience by moving our mock indoor campsite outdoors. After researching various plant, animal, and insect life in Eastern North Carolina, the children will be able to excavate a donated sandpit looking for fossilized remains. The children can also use their bug catching kit to search for native insects, and do plant identification with leaf rubbings. Opportunities for fun and learning abound.