Experience the Outdoors, Don’t Just Read about It - Part One

School starts and kids get new textbooks. They sit in the classroom on the first day and look at the neat piles of books, gathering clues as to what they will be learning about during the school year. Chances are they will make regular trips to the school library, each week to get a new book. The ‘readers’ probably didn’t get to read as many books as they would have liked over the summer (“We just went to the library a few days ago; you’ll just have to wait until I have time to take you back,” says mom/dad/babysitter.) These kids will be ecstatic to roam the shelves at school. For the kids who dread reading and do so because it is an assigned chore, the weekly library visits hold less appeal.

Some of these kids, both the kids with lots of enthusiasm as well as those who are less so, pick up books about nature. Sometimes it’s a kid who loves to read everything, but more likely it is a kid who reads into a single subject and becomes an ‘expert.’ Who wouldn’t love reading about nature? The books have lots of pictures and you learn facts that are guaranteed to gross out a few adults at the dinner table.

My problem with these books is that kids tend not to pay attention to some important facts, such as where an animal is from. I’ve had third graders on field trips ask if the sanctuary they are visiting – in New England – has black mamba snakes, jaguars, primates, and a whole host of other animals. At first, I thought kids were joking, I mean, when was the last time they saw a spider monkey hanging from the backyard bird feeder?

But, no, because they had read about these animals and how they lived in wild places and our 2000-acre suburban sanctuary seems wild to the kids, so, well, we must have Wild Animals. I remember one ten year old boy that adored snakes and was a fount of information about snakes. He would recite facts about snakes (to the point that he annoyed and bored his classmates) in a superior fashion – that I didn’t know about all of these snakes he saw as a down falling in both my intelligence and training.

However, he would run off into the shrub and come back saying that he just saw snake X – a snake that could not live in New England. At one point I saw the common garter snake he was chasing after, but he identified it as something more exotic. His classmates looked at me with some anxiety as I explained the identity of the snake; all while their fellow student argued.

I named the snakes that lived in Massachusetts and told this boy that those were the animals that he could choose from when trying to determine which animal he saw. Oh, but he had read about these other snakes and he knew I must be wrong …. (continued)