Muddy Sneakers, Kids in the Creek
Kids in the Creek
For eighth-graders in one western North Carolina county, science class means getting your hands wet and mucking around in local streams and creeks. It’s called Kids in the Creek, a hands-on water quality education program that works with middle schoolers throughout Haywood County.
“The most fun was shocking the fish – there were lots of fish!” said Maceon McCracken, a student at Canton Middle School in Canton, N.C. “Oh, and the bugs, there were lots of different insects, like mayflies.”
McCracken joined every eighth-grader in Haywood County this past September for what Haywood Waterways Association Executive Director Ron Moser calls “our premier education event.”
According to Moser, Haywood’s Kids in the Creek program was the first of its kind initiated by the Tennessee Valley Authority in North Carolina.
“We began in 1998 with one school, Waynesville Middle,” Moser explained, “and now every eighth-grade student in the county participates.”
Kids in the Creek enriches the eighth-grade North Carolina science curriculum with hands-on experiences. For Jeff Battle, a Canton Middle School science teacher and a Kids in the Creek facilitator, there’s a big difference between seeing a picture of a fish and holding a live fish in your hands.
“It definitely makes a bigger impression,” he said.
Over the past 11 years, Haywood’s Kids in the Creek program has reached nearly 8,000 students for more than 32,000 hours of hands-on scientific instruction. Moser said the Haywood Waterways Association tried different formats through the years before settling on the current format that has been in place for a number of years.
Today’s Kids in the Creek program in Haywood County consists of three sections. The first one is an introduction, where instructors and volunteers go into classrooms and talk with students about water quality issues and outline the program. The next section is a half-day field trip to the Pigeon River at the Canton Recreation Park, where students literally get their feet wet.
Here, students transition through four different learning stations manned by experienced biologists, scientists and educators. At the fish station, students don chest waders and hit the river with North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission biologists or other trained biologists and conduct an electro-shock fish survey. The students help capture the fish, help collect data, and learn how to identify different fish species.
At another station, students explore the insects and other creatures that live on and in the bottom of the river. Pinkston and other students use nets to scrape rocks and dig up material, which they then try to identify. One of their recent findings was a “cool crawdad” McCracken and her group discovered.
There is a chemistry and water quality station where students learn how to measure temperature, pH levels, turbidity of the water and more. There’s also an Enviroscape station, which serves as a replica of a watershed with farms, subdivisions, factories, roads and creeks—facets of a real subdivision. Cocoa is sprinkled in to represent bare soil. Red and green crystals represent pesticides and herbicides. When water mists into the Enviroscape, students watch as the reds, greens and browns find their way into the model’s waterways.
The third and last section of the program is a classroom follow-up the next spring. In this section students calculate the Index of Biotic Integrity of the river using data sheets prepared by Fish & Wildlife Associates of Whittier, N.C. Much of the data the students collect is used to help agencies like the North Carolina Wildlife and Resources Commission and the TVA to garner information about what’s in the streams, creeks and riverways of Haywood County.
Interesting things sometimes turn up. According to Dwayne Squires, a science and math teacher at Canton Middle School, Kids in the Creek discovered the first endangered Appalachian elktoe mussel documented in the Pigeon River since the early 1900s.
“It’s a great opportunity for kids to do hands-on learning,” said Squires. “But at the same time, they learn that what we teach in class is applicable in life.”
While not all the children will become scientists or biologists, they will all learn how their actions impact the environment.
“What could be more important than educating our children—the future leaders of Haywood County—about water quality and how all watershed activities affect water quality?” Moser suggests. “Our goal is to teach the hows and whys of better watershed practices and hopefully people will do the right thing.”
Muddy Sneakers
In a clearing in the woods, a dozen fifth-graders stand in a circle. Their instructor stands in the middle, explaining the game they are about to play. Using movement and repetition, the children will learn to identify cloud types—cumulus, stratus, cirrus, and nimbus. The children have hiked all morning in a drizzling rain, and, using their compasses, they have navigated their way to this spot in Dupont Forest near Brevard in western North Carolina.
In the bus on the way over, they wrote about the weather in their journals. They noted 100 percent cloud cover, with slight precipitation and a light wind. Now, as they ascend the trail, they stop periodically to note the changes in weather. They observe that the temperature has dropped, and the wind has increased.
When the children finish the weather game, they will once again shoulder their backpacks and set out for Cedar Rock, where they will stop to eat their bag lunches. After lunch, if the drizzle has stopped, they may pull their ponchos off and sit for awhile and write poems in their journals before heading back down the mountain. They will spend the whole day out here in the forest, learning the things that the state of North Carolina says every fifth-grader should know. And, if the proponents of this program are right, they will learn many other things as well.
These children represent a small sample of the hundreds served by the Muddy Sneakers program, a nonprofit organization that works with public schools to provide experiential learning opportunities for fifth- and eighth-graders in the North Carolina counties of Buncombe, Henderson, Transylvania and Jackson. The program is the brainchild of Sandy Schenck, executive director of Green River Preserve, an environmental summer camp in Transylvania County.
Schenck says that his years at Green River have shown him the power of the outdoors to create more joyous, more inquisitive children. He also sees the long-term implications of teaching children to love and respect the natural world.
“If our children coming along are not willing to contribute to our [environmental] efforts, then we are building on a bed of sand,” Schenck says. “This is not rocket science, just basic awareness.”
A couple of years ago, Schenck began searching for a way to bring the outdoor classroom to every child, not just families who regularly enjoyed the outdoors or those who could afford summer camps. He began his journey by talking with other people he knew, and what emerged from those discussions was the Muddy Sneakers program. The program is designed around North Carolina’s student curriculum known as the Standard Course of Study. According to Schenck, Muddy Sneakers offers a reasonably priced program that taps the unused capacity of existing school resources, such as activity buses.
In the spring of 2008, Muddy Sneakers ran its first pilot expeditions and is now into its first full year. Always mindful of ways to demonstrate the program’s core values of respect, gratefulness, and compassion, instructors focus primarily on the state’s science curriculum. However, with each lesson, there are opportunities for instructors to bring in other disciplines. For example, students are often encouraged to write reflectively about their experiences in the outdoors.
In Transylvania County, Dupont Forest serves as the Muddy Sneakers classroom. Students from Brevard Elementary, Brevard Middle, Pisgah Forest Elementary, Brevard Academy, Rosman Elementary, and T.C. Henderson schools participate. According to Muddy Sneakers Program Director Lauren Agrella, the goal is to collaborate with teachers by finding out what they have already done in the classroom and what the Muddy Sneakers staff can build on. Classroom teachers then accompany their students on the Muddy Sneakers outings. Agrella says that, for the most part, teachers have been really receptive to the program. These outdoor learning experiences are not field trips in the traditional sense.
“We are asking for people to be active and engaged on a field trip,” Agrella says. “We are asking for a partnership.”
Muddy Sneakers provides field instructors and some supplies such as ponchos, backpacks and compasses. The school pays three dollars per child and offers the buses and bus drivers. Students provide their own snacks, lunches and writing materials.
Muddy Sneakers currently employs 13 field staff who come from a variety of backgrounds from former teachers and Outward Bound instructors to state park employees and retired scientists. Agrella, a former classroom teacher for seven years, spends her time writing and refining curriculum lessons, designing instructor field kits, talking with school representatives, and giving presentations about the program to potential friends and supporters.
Jeanne DeYong’s fifth grade class at Brevard Elementary School has participated in the Muddy Sneakers program, and so far this year, her students have studied weather, land forms, erosion, energy and ecosystems. DeYong says the program provides important reinforcement for what the children have learned in the classroom. She also says that fifth grade is the ideal time to introduce children to the program.
Agrella notes that some studies are already underway to try to determine the impact of Muddy Sneakers on academic assessments such as end-of-grade tests. She says much of the early evidence suggests that the program is working, and she points to anecdotal evidence—comments from students and teachers, for example—to support the benefits of the program.
For example, students with different learning styles and with learning difficulties (such as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) seem to benefit from the program because it provides kinesthetic (hands-on) learning, which can be especially beneficial for students who have difficulty being quiet and sitting still in school. She adds that, in addition to gaining knowledge and academic skills, students are learning about leadership, self-confidence, and caring for others.
Muddy Sneakers offers outdoor experiences in all school months except for December and January. According to Agrella, the unpredictable weather and the physical activities involved provide unique challenges for participants. There are some students in the county who have never been in Dupont Forest. Some of those have never even been hiking. One of the most exciting parts of the program for Agrella is when students who have never been to the forest get excited about the area and want to take their parents back to see the same spot.
“It’s not about getting everyone to the place,” Agrella says. “It’s about getting everyone outside.”
Two early supporters of the Muddy Creek program included John Huie and Aleen Steinberg. Huie, formerly an executive director of Outward Bound, worked as a consultant to raise funds for Muddy Sneakers. Contributions came mainly from individuals and corporations, including the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina and Diamond Brand.
Aleen Steinberg became involved in the Muddy Sneakers program when Schneck approached her about the idea a couple of years ago. They had previously worked together in the fight to save Dupont Forest from development and already knew each other’s strong commitment to the environment. Programs like Muddy Sneakers have been hugely successful in other states.
“It is an idea whose time has come,” Steinberg says. “The pendulum goes so far one way, it’s got to start to come back another.”
Steinberg now serves on the Muddy Sneakers Board and is active in fundraising efforts. She also regularly attends classes with students as well as training sessions for instructors. On one frigid January day this year, Steinberg ventured on a training session on top of a mountain in Dupont Forest. Though temperatures hovered in the teens all day, she kept a cheery mood.
“It’s just wonderful to watch,” she says.
According to Schenck, the Muddy Sneakers Board hopes to engage more schools, eventually expanding its program statewide. Since some of their funds come with stipulations that they must be used for a particular population of students, the Board and staff are constantly looking for ways to match funds with the right schools. The program is not just for schools in rural areas.
After all, children can go outside wherever they are.
Getting kids outdoors
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”
— Edward Abbey
Muddy Sneakers and Kids in the Creek are part of a growing national awareness to get young people outdoors.
The writer Edward Abbey often fought to bring environmental concerns to the forefront of the American consciousness and became one of the most articulate and bold defenders of the wilderness. In his 1982 book Down the River, Abbey argued that modern technological advances have come at a hefty cost.
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit,” he said.
Richard Louv, in his 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, echoes these sentiments. Children today simply don’t play outside like they once did, he says. Instead, they spend hours mesmerized by electronic gadgets. Louv proposes a term to describe this sense of disconnect with the natural world—“nature deficit-disorder”—and he offers a simple solution for this problem: Get kids outside. Do that, and you will have healthier, more focused, more creative children. In addition, you will nurture the next generation of adults who will love and protect the land which sustains them. As Edward Abbey put it: “The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”