Learning from the Natural World—at Mills Riverside Park

by Sharyl Green

Sharyl Green is a third grade teacher at Jericho Elementary School. Sharyl and colleague Eric Barker added meaningful extensions and community connections to their outdoor classroom work after they participated in a Place-based course about Jericho in the spring and summer of 2002, coordinated by Walter Poleman, UVM, Amy Demerest, formerly of Chittenden East Supervisory Union, and Amy Powers, formerly of Shelburne Farms. Now Sharyl, Eric, and colleague Denise Larrabee use Mills Riverside Park trips as the focus for their third grade curriculum studies in geology and Jericho history.


Today sixty-one third graders, three teachers, and eighteen parents arrived at school with work gloves, goggles, bow saws, and bailing twine. Mission? Debris shelter building at Mills Riverside Park. Yesterday was high spring, seventy-two degrees after school. Today temperatures were dropping through the forties, heavy clouds and some wind, with rain and snow promised. No matter. Today we turned forest floor litter, fallen branches of all sizes, into building material. Goggle-eyed children toted branches to chosen sites, braced and sawed as eagle-eyed adults supervised. It was misty and magical, cloudy and industrious. All over the woods bars were lashed onto pairs of standing trees about eight feet apart. In groups of four or five, children laid up branches as big around as their wrists, angling them to create enough room to cozy into later on. Children doing real work in the company of adults. Adults stepped back now, watching the children personalize their shelters. One group lashed a horizontal triangle of sticks and wove a shelf wide enough to hold four lunch boxes. The group along the stream stabbed forked sticks into the ground next to their shelter, and balanced a flat stone on them, a place for the forest spirits to gather. At a shelter on the slope I watched children expose the rounded top of a buried boulder and give it special powers. Next door four classmates ventured out to collect a seat apiece then hauled and rolled the logs and rocks into place, side by side. My fifth group had rigged a virtual doorbell, looping twine around pine branches in a way that caused them to wiggle when someone pulled at the dangling twine just beside the door.

All through the woods, I hear their banter.
“This is the best trip yet to MRP.”

We should plan to stay here all day.”
“Here, it’s your turn to saw.”
“My dream is to have a cabin built like a one room school, right here in the forest, where we could come about once a week and work in the woods all day,” I declare to anyone within earshot.

We’ve come to this park about once a month since September to spend the mornings studying the impact humans have had on this piece of land, learning our way around the trails by noting landmarks that catch our attention: rows of faded sunflowers, a “T” in the trail, the bridge over “muddy brook”, the corner of the old red barn we see from the corner of our eyes just off the trail. Children learn on the first trip that this is the place to turn up to our June campsite area. On that trip they also meet Hannah Brown, some 270 years old now. She was one of Jericho’s first settlers, and in my great grandmothers shawl, and a long faded skirt I appear on the covered bridge as Hannah herself, first marveling at the changes I see around me, including the bridge we’re all gathered on, and then I go on to tell the story of my family’s choice to settle here along the Browns River, surprised they’ve given the river my last name. Children tell me there’s Browns River Middle School, too, and ask about the main road named Browns Trace. I tell them about the Abenaki who followed the deer trails through the forest to find hunting grounds, how they made slash mark on the trees to find their way back, and how it was those slash marks my family followed to find this land. It became a worn trail, some trees were cleared, now those powerful things you call cars are driving along it. I promise to visit their classrooms another day and tell more stories. “I’m a little tired, now. I’m going back to my grave site. You’ll see the cemetery on your way back to school.” Then I slip out of sight, stash my “Hannah clothes” into a bag, and return to join them on the bus as their teacher.

Back at school, in our MRP journals I encourage students to rough out their first maps of the park, remembering the landmarks we chose to help guide them through our journey, this time on paper. “Start where the bus turned into the parking lot and we got out and walked across the covered bridge.” This is a site plan they’re drawing, “as if you were a bird flying over the park and looking down”. We rehearse possible symbols for a key, and they’re off, invested and often accurate in their trail details and the location of chosen landmarks. On one child’s map, there’s a ghostly human outline on the covered bridge. A small symbol of the same shape has floated up to the key. Next to it is written “Hannah Brown”.

These gifts of insight and connection offer refreshment every day. Children’s reflection on their experiences deepens my own commitment to authentic practice.
In November we return to our study site in the forest, each child searching to find out what they’re curious about. It’s that wide open. We’ve carved ourselves some boundaries in the forest, and children pace around, looking up into the trees and along the stone wall, turning up the leaf litter, pondering a big brush pile alongside the trail, being curious, then settling with their MRP journals onto the forest floor to sketch what’s around them and record their question(s). I notice a child pouring over the tiniest tree, just up to his knee, another puzzling over the rusty barbed wire lying over the stone wall next to a sturdy barbed wire fence that adds height to the separation between forest and rolling pasture. Children sit at the base of white pines, next to a mossy glacial erratic, and one child stares through the forest taken by how green the light appears to be. It’s nippy by now, children’s fingers are cold, it’s time to hike back to the school bus.

I see that I can divide students’ questions into two big groups: natural communities and human history and impact, but I soon realize that it’s all connected: plants and animals, stone and soil, light and leafing out patterns. I am both excited and overwhelmed that the questions that sit before us will take some creative journeying through multiple resources to find the answers. Why is the light so green? Who built the stone wall? Why didn’t they move the old barbed wire before they put up the new barbed wire? What causes trees to branch in the trunk? Why needles not leaves? Why do some trees have bark gone on the truck? How did they find a place to make a route for the trail? And this series: I wonder how the big boulder on my power spot got there? If it rolled down the hill, did it smash trees, or did the boulder come before the trees? Why did it stop right there? There’s nothing to stop it.




I quickly understood it would take several adults to help this research move forward simultaneously. Two parents with experience searching the web sat with students one by one, so that each student had a print out or two relative to their questions. When class time ran out these same parents got online at home and delivered relevant articles to my students in the following days. All papers and notes were kept in each child’s bright yellow pocket folder labeled “Research”. A forester who knew the park well came as a guest speaker with his fourth grade daughter who’d been in my class and in the park the previous year. We invited a woman from the park board who’d been instrumental in researching the possible trail layouts over the past two years to come talk to us all, and specifically give small group assistance to those students curious about the trail development. We called a senior member of our community whose farm shares the stone wall boundary with the park. We knew she’d grown up on the same road where her farm is, and she verified it to be at least 100 years old, based on her own memory and that of a neighbor even older than herself. They’d played up in the woods as children, and she also told us the story of moose crashing through the barbed wire fence, tangled by the wire they dragged along. I typed up the notes from that conversation, now an official piece of MRP resource data. Our enrichment teacher lent us her personal copy of an old stonewall building book, pages nearly falling out, that described and illustrated the old practice of building a stone boat to haul the largest boulders out of the way so sheep could graze without spraining their ankles. Children used to help their parents toss smaller rocks aside, and we learned that sometimes these “tossed” walls were all that got accomplished in a year, and later they returned to pile the rocks into “built” walls. We could see that a built wall had been dismantled for about six feet when the new trail through our study site was cleared.

Students took notes, paraphrasing what they heard and read. It’s a complex skill, and one that opens intellectual doors as students’ make choices about what’s important for them to record, how they will organize notes on the page, when an illustration will help bring clarity or a personal reference might extend the reader’s understanding. Along the way they conferenced with a classmate as well as adults, each time listening to their partner’s questions. What wasn’t clear yet? What gaps were there? How could longer work be tightened?

Students organized their work into tri-fold brochures, bulleting facts, illustrating around the print and writing a personal connection (prose or poetry) along one panel to give a personal touch. Here the researchers expressed their passion for the park, sometimes inviting the reader to join in the stewardship.

On a sunny day in the spring we met our public librarians on the covered bridge and presented laminated, color copies of these brochures to them, each child having a moment to give a personal guided tour of his or her brochure to one of the librarians. They have all been outfitted with bar codes, and can now be perused and checked out by patrons who want to learn more about the park that’s just beyond the backyard of the library. In this way the children have gifted the town, and can see their hard work have a life of its own.