- Hello everyone and thank you so much for joining me.

My name is Tori Duval, and I'm the Outreach Education Program Manager for the Friends of the WNC Nature Center, which is a mouthful.

And you are here for "Growing Up Wild".

So today's program is going to be about a really wonderful curriculum called "Growing Up Wild".

And we're going to explore a few activities.

And I'm also going to explain to you all how to lead these activities and where you can attend full workshops.

So this is gonna be a quick little taste into what these full-day workshops look like.

And then I will definitely give you information as to how you can find these workshops on your own.

So we're going to go ahead and get started.

There we go, all right.

So as I said, I'm from the Friends of the WNC Nature Center, which is the nonprofit that helps to support the Nature Center.

I'm sure that some of you have been to the Nature Center before if you live locally.

If you haven't been, you've probably at least heard of us.

We are a native wildlife facility, so we are a zoo.

We have a lot of different animals that live at the Nature Center.

As you can see, we have a few examples up here.

We do not call ourselves a zoo because we do focus on native wildlife.

So the species that live at the Nature Center either live here in the wild now or historically they used to live in this area.

And so we don't want people showing up expecting to see giraffes and elephants when instead they're going to see black bears and gray foxes.

Both wonderful animals.

We just wanna make sure everyone knows what we are and who we represent.

But we are accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

And to get this accreditation, they have very high standards, not just for animal welfare and care, and you know, habitat maintenance and all of those things, but also for education.

So a big part of an AZA accreditation, they look at your education programs.

They look at who you're reaching.

They look at community members and partnerships that you hold.

So one of our big focuses is teaching not just children and guests at the Nature Center but the community as a whole.

We wanna reach out to the entire community in western North Carolina to teach them about why these these things are so important.

And that is why I'm here today.

So one of the things that we offer are teacher workshops.

So the "Growing Up Wild" curriculum that we're going to check out today is a workshop that is going to be available at the Nature Center for free.

So we are accredited.

We are trained to teach these workshops through the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

And I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about "Growing Up Wild".

But just know that if you do attend a workshop at the Nature Center all of the cost of materials are covered.

There's no fee to attend.

You're gonna leave with your curriculum book and everything.

And it's a really wonderful opportunity.

It also does count towards those continuing credit hours.

So if you're looking for CE hours, a lot of these workshops count towards that as well.

And of course if you're not a teacher, you can come anyway and just get some really wonderful resources for working with children.

So "Growing Up Wild" is a curriculum that is run by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

So it is nationwide, it's not just North Carolina.

And their focus is creating curriculum and creating activities and lessons for "Growing Up Wild" that work with young children that focus on exploring nature.

There are lots of Project Wild curriculum, so it's not just "Growing Up Wild".

Project Wild is the larger sort of overarching term.

There is a Project Wild Workshop.

There's also a Flying Wild workshop which is about raptors or birds in general.

There is an Aquatic Wild.

There are many many different ones that can be taught, and we are going to be offering a large variety of these at the Nature Center in the next few years.

So I'll provide information about that, about how you can sign up for workshops at the end.

But what I wanted to show you, since I cannot give you the books at this moment since I'm not physically there with you, is the general activity format of these books.

So for every activity that's in "Growing Up Wild" they always have, in the far left hand side, they have those standards and correlations.

So looking at like the Headstart outcomes and the NEEYC accreditation criteria.

They'll also have resources.

Of course none are listed here because this is just the format.

But fiction and non-fiction books that you can read you know, websites, CDs, whatever else it may be.

And then diving into the activity, they do provide quick facts.

So one thing that I want to make sure I leave you all with an impression is that you do not have to be an expert in these topics.

You don't have to be comfortable going out into nature in order to provide these activities for children.

It's not necessary.

So they're going to provide some fun quick facts for you that make you hopefully feel a little bit more confident in what you are teaching so that you don't have to go and do a bunch of research on your own or feel like you have to have all of this background knowledge in order to lead these activities.

And then there is a vocabulary section which is really wonderful.

And usually we'll use a few of those words and we'll do spelling activities and things like that.

Materials and prep.

And then of course our major activities.

In addition to the main activity, there's always a very specific outdoor portion.

Some of these activities are meant to be outside the entire time, but not all of them.

So there's always a take me outside section.

On the next pages there are also a lot of additional options and extensions for these activities.

So there's a Healthy Me, which has to do with physical movement.

A Helping Hands, which is getting them into like their community.

Mighty math.

There's always a math connection in these activities.

Home connections, art, music and movement.

So there's a song and a little dance that you can do for each of these.

One of my personal favorites is the snack connection.

So they use choosemyplate.gov.

And each of these lessons has a themed snack to go with it.

So this is what the general framework looks like for these books.

And what we are going to do is we are going to jump right in, and we are going to start with, oops, excuse me, Spider Web Wonders.

So, we're just gonna have to exit that way.

Okay, so for Spider Web Wonders.

Now that you can see my face again.

It's a very, very fun activity that I like to do.

I like to start off with, not everyone is comfortable with spiders and that's totally fine.

Luckily none of the activities that I'm about to show you involve touching spiders.

So we go over a few vocabulary words.

You know, web is a really wonderful word to start with.

And we discuss why spiders build webs.

What are the benefits?

So it's not just catching food, although that is a big part of it is catching their prey.

It can also be protecting your egg sacs.

So they'll spin webs around their or they'll spin the thread, the silk around their egg sacs.

It can be homes for themselves.

There's a lot of different reasons why spiders build webs other than just catching their own food.

So that's a really wonderful question to sort of get the ball rolling, if you will, when you're talking to kids about these.

I'm gonna show you now the Spider Web Wonders lesson plan because you don't have it physically in front of you.

So this is what it looks like.

So you can see all filled out on the left hand side here what it actually looks like when there are resources.

So a list of books.

We've got our wild wonderful words here.

It's got our materials list.

It's got our activity.

We're gonna do a little bit of this.

We're obviously not going to do the whole thing.

And then we'll come down here, and it has our different connections and our movement and our little snack that's shaped like a spider.

So that's what your general setup is going to be.

So for our first activity to warm everybody up, start thinking about spiders, what we're going to do is a little homemade web.

So this is my homemade web.

It's pretty fancy.

So this is just black construction paper and two different types of tape.

So obviously this tape is easier to see.

This is just standard like scotch tape.

And then the tape that I know is a little bit more difficult to see.

Hopefully you can see that outline, is double-sided tape.

Because when spiders spin webs, they don't just spin one type of thread or silk, they have a few different types.

Some are sticky and some are not.

So a really wonderful introduction to webs is to have your kids take their fingers and sort of trace along that web.

Really wonderful sensory exploration here to feel what feels sticky and what doesn't.

You can ask them why do you think parts of the web are sticky and part of them aren't.

And then you can challenge them to find a safe path.

So spiders use non-stick parts of their webs to actually get around so they don't get stuck to their web.

So you can challenge them to find a non-sticky path through the web.

So that's a really wonderful introduction activity.

Another quick introduction activity that you can do is talk about the different shapes of web.

So there's not just one specific spider web shape, there are several different shapes.

These are the four main ones that we usually talk about.

So there is the sheet web or the hammock, which is what I like to call it.

So there's a picture of a spider and then there's a picture of the web.

So there's a set of cards in the back of your book.

So you can print these out.

I laminated mine just to make them a little bit more durable.

And then I also highlighted, because I use these in larger groups.

I highlighted as you can see the shape up there in the corner so that when the kids are trying to find their partner, they know what shape they're looking for.

So there are a couple different ways you can do this.

If you've got a small group, you can make it a matching game where they're just trying to match up the circle web with the circle web, you know, or the triangle web with the triangle web.

If you have a larger group, this is what I generally do, is I will give everybody one card.

They either get the spider or a web and they have to find a partner.

So if they get a triangle web, they're looking for somebody who has their triangle in the corner right there and so on and so forth.

So that's a nice way to introduce that spiders spin different shapes of webs.

And then to sort of tie that in, we have a little web weaving activity.

So these are both in the back of the "Growing Up Wild" curriculum.

So I did not make these myself, although they would be very easy to make.

So they give two examples.

They give the tangle web and the orb web which is the circle.

If you were interested in doing other ones, these would be very simple to make on the computer yourself.

And all I did was after I printed them out.

Let me do our orb web.

After I printed them out, I hole punched all the dots.

And then you'll just take a piece of yarn or have the kids take a piece of yarn.

And you'll start weaving a web.

So the yarn just comes through.

It's a really wonderful practice for like fine motor skills and things like that.

Like a nice little art project.

So they can weave their web.

It's fun for them to pick colors and things like that and get creative with it.

And again, you can make these in different shapes if you wanna create your own.

You can also laminate them.

It makes them a little bit more durable, so a little bit easier to stick that yarn through.

And especially if it's something that you're going to use more than once.

So those are a few activities that correlate with our Spider Web Wonders.

The last thing that I'll mention with that and then we're going to move on to Bird Beak Buffet is another activity that I like to do, especially with slightly older kids, is I'll take a much larger piece of yarn than this.

And we'll take a chair.

So a folding chair, anything that has four legs.

And we'll flip it upside down.

So I'm not gonna do the whole thing, but I'll give you a general idea.

So we take our chair.

We flip it upside down.

And then you're gonna take your yarn and attach it to one of your four legs.

Doesn't matter which one.

You're going to tie a little knot.

And then that's the only knot that you should have to tie.

And then they actually weave a web using the four legs of the chair so they can choose whatever style of web they would like.

So they leave a web using the four legs of their chair.

After they've finished, it's really great for them to work in partners or small groups so they get that practice of working with others, problem solving, creating a plan together.

You can test their webs by taking little pieces of cotton balls and flicking them at the webs and seeing if they stick.

Those are the bugs.

So that's a really nice extension if you have more time and if your students are old enough to participate in that.

Usually with the really young ones, it's just a little bit too much for them to try to do.

Not all, just depends.

So that was a very quick, quick introduction into Spider Web Wonders, but I wanted to make sure that we saved plenty of time for Bird Beak Buffet.

So that is going to be our second curriculum piece that we're going to look at.

So for Bird Beak Buffet, I'm gonna show you the lesson plan for that one as well.

Nope, that's not it.

There we go.

So for Bird Beak Buffet, the very, very hands-on activity that's looking at the different shapes of beaks and what their function would be.

So why do birds have beaks that look different?

What is the purpose of that?

What can you learn just from looking at the shape of the beak?

So again, we've got all of our standards and correlations over there.

We've got our quick facts.

So if you wanna read up a little bit about birds and the basic beak shapes and what they exist for.

And then of course we have our vocabulary words you can practice spelling.

I would throw some simpler words in there, too.

I see beak in there.

I think bird again is a really wonderful one to talk about.

And even food.

Food is a really excellent word to use in this activity because a major focus of the activity is going to be bird diet.

So this one does require a little bit more materials.

I'm gonna show you what we use.

We try to keep it as low-cost as possible.

Then of course there are our other options.

The bird watching is a really, really excellent one.

We're gonna talk more about that after I show you the activity.

That can be something that seems intimidating but there are very easy ways to get around not knowing a lot about birds, I promise.

And not knowing how to identify them based on their calls, which honestly I'm not very good at myself.

But for the main...

There's a spider on my table right now, like a real live spider that just happened to to join us.

I just thought it was really funny.

So for the main Bird Beak Buffet activity, we're gonna pop over here.

Alright, so for Bird Beak Buffet, what you are doing is you are going to be using some very low-cost examples of what different birds beaks are like and what type of food they eat.

So we're going to start with a robin.

We're going to start with robins.

I know it looks a little silly.

It's because it's trying to pick up the green in the image and put the background on it.

So for robins, they have fairly large beaks that are kind of pointy.

Not nearly as pointy as a heron, which we're gonna check out as well.

And robins are big into eating worms.

If you know anything about birds, you may have seen robins down on the ground before pecking at the ground in the dirt.

They're looking for worms.

So our first demonstration.

Most of these just happen in these little Tupperware containers.

There's dirt in this tub and there are pieces of yarn in this tub.

And that yarn is our worms.

So your students will take a pair of tweezers.

Not super-pointy tweezers.

So you want some that kind of have a blunt edge.

And I say that because we're going to be using our very pointy tweezers for a different bird.

So robins don't really stab with their beaks like birds with very, very pointy beaks do.

Instead they use them like little grabbers.

And so they can practice.

And of course you can bury these worms better than they're buried right now so they can practice pulling those worms out of the dirt.

So there's our robin activity.

Our next bird that we're going to check out is the finch.

This one is gonna pick up the green so much.

So this is our finch.

This is a purple finch.

And they have short stout beaks that are excellent for cracking seeds.

I'm just gonna move that picture outta the way because I know it's distracting.

So they have these wonderful little seed-cracking beaks.

And so what you'll need for this is again, one of those plastic tubs and then bird seed.

So we're gonna use our bird seed, and we're gonna take a nutcracker.

And they can try to get seeds in there and then see how hard it is to crack them.

Bird seed is a cheap option.

You don't have to use bird seed.

You can use other materials if you would like to.

Not everyone has nutcrackers lying around, and that's totally understandable.

Something else that works well are tongs.

So like large kitchen tongs can be a really nice option for this as well.

It gives the same effect.

Alright, our next option is going to be...

I don't know why it's...

Hang on, I'm gonna adjust.

We're gonna move over here.

I'm not sure why it's wanting to pull so much green.

All right, so our next one is bird of prey, is raptor.

I'm gonna move you off for a second.

So raptors of course are hunting birds.

They eat mice and rats and snakes and other animals.

So they're meat eaters and their beaks are extremely sharp.

So for this activity.

These look like Cheetos.

They are not.

They are Play-Doh.

They just happen to be orange.

It doesn't matter what color Play-Doh you use.

Whichever one you prefer.

And then some kid-safe scissors that aren't gonna cut your finger.

And then they'll use those scissors to snip off pieces of their Play-Doh, of their worms.

All right, moving our worms out of the way.

Our next Bird Beak Buffet is one of my favorite ones.

This one and duck.

I have two favorites.

This is one of them, it's woodpecker.

So here's my little woodpecker sign.

And you can see woodpeckers have these extremely long pointy beaks.

And of course they're known for pecking into trees.

That's what they're famous for.

That's why they called woodpeckers.

And they do that to catch insects.

So this is the one where you're going to want those really pointy tweezers.

You can see how pointy those are.

And we took uncooked rice and put it on a log.

Now we happen to have a lot of these logs lying around because we use them for animal habitat.

So I understand not everybody has a full log.

That's totally fine.

You can go out into the woods and grab a piece of bark.

You know, just use what you have.

Something that has texture that's similar to bark.

And so what we're going to do is your kids are gonna take those tweezers and they're gonna practice picking up individual grains of rice.

And then they can even make like little... You can't see that pile.

They can make little piles.

There we go.

They can make little piles after they've collected one at a time and practice counting.

See how many little pieces, how many grains of rice they can get.

So this is a really nice fine motor skill activity as well.

Just a few more Bird Beak Buffet options here.

We've got, I'll do heron next.

So we've got heron.

Now herons live near the water.

Here's our heron picture there.

There is is.

So, herons live near the water.

They also have long pointy beaks, like woodpeckers.

They use them for...

Honestly, a lot of times they use them for grabbing but also for stabbing.

So they'll actually stab into their food as well.

So for this one, I just have a tub of water and chopsticks.

We put a wedge of paper and then a rubber band around this so that they're like training chopsticks, so they stay together.

You can buy training chopsticks, but this was cheaper.

And then we just use some little foam animals because we do have those at the Nature Center for other crafts.

If you don't foam animals lying around, that is totally fine.

It's pretty much anything that can grab with the chopstick that isn't going to fall apart in the water to represent fish and things like that.

So they can practice doing that.

They can also stab as well.

All right, my second favorite one is duck.

So here's my duck container.

And for duck.

There's our lovely little duck.

They're strainers.

So they have those kind of blunt beaks.

They put them down in the water.

And similar to whales, they'll strain out their food.

So they eat a lot of like plant material.

There's our label right there.

So I'm going to turn this around so you can actually see what we're doing.

So we have a fine mesh strainer.

You want it to be pretty fine.

And then I have my tub of water.

And in that tub of water if you're wondering why it's a gross color, there is tea in there.

So I just opened up a tea bag.

Doesn't matter what kind.

Green looks good if you've got green tea, but it doesn't have to be.

And then you're gonna put that strainer into the water.

And they're gonna get their food that way.

The very last one is hummingbird.

And I did not put water in this container but I just wanted to give you an idea of what it looks like.

We don't always do hummingbird because I don't find it as accessible.

I don't think the materials are as easy to come by as some of the other activities.

So we do use a hummingbird feeder, and then we also use a pipette.

So a little plastic pipette.

Not everybody has these lying around, and I totally understand that.

If you were to do this part of the activity, there would be water in here.

And then you would take that pipette because hummingbirds slurp.

And you would put it in and then you would just squeeze the water out nice and slow.

So again, that one I don't always do because the materials can be a little bit more difficult for people to find.

And I want this activity to be as accessible and cheap as possible.

We don't want you going out and breaking the bank to do this.

So that's the meat of Bird Beak Buffet.

I always encourage people to go out afterwards and do some bird watching.

You do not have to be an expert.

I myself am not good at bird identification, especially when it comes to listening for birds.

I'm not good at hearing bird calls.

That's okay.

Instead of focusing on, "Ooh, I don't know what type of bird that is," you know, or "I don't know enough about them," ask more open-ended questions.

So you can ask yourself and your kid, why do you think you know that bird is calling?

Do we hear just one bird or do we hear multiple birds?

Could they be talking to each other?

What do you think they could be communicating to each other?

You know, there's so many ways that you can explore birds in your environment without having to know a lot about them.

If you are interested in learning more about like bird ID or you see a bird and you wanna know what kind it is, iNaturalist is a really wonderful option for that.

It's a free citizen science app that you can put on your phone and your tablet or whatever.

Take pictures, upload them.

And scientists and other experts in the community will help you identify what you're looking at.

So that's a really wonderful option if you are looking for that.

And then the last thing that I'll say about Bird Beak Buffet is that the snack opportunity is very fun for this one.

So you make your own trail mix using examples from all of the exploration that we just did.

So using nuts and seeds, using goldfish for the herons, using gummy worms for the robins.

So it's sort of a little bit more of a creative way to represent all the different diets that we looked at for different birds.

All right, everyone, the very last thing that I'm going to share with you is my contact information and also a thank you.

So I do wanna say thank you very much for joining me.

I really do appreciate it.

If you are interested in learning more about these workshops, we do offer them on the weekends.

And again, they are free of cost.

They're usually like most of the day, they're about six hours or so long.

So it's a good chunk of your day.

But if you are interested in attending one of these for whatever reason.

If you're a teacher or if you're a parent, does not matter to us.

They are free regardless.

you can email me.

So my email is just education@wildwnc.org And I will let you know when we have specific dates for workshops.

So if you are interested, please feel free to reach out to me.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me.

Thank you all so much for joining me.

And I hope you enjoyed the presentation.