Health & Fitness
The Student Initiative to Reintroduce the Community to Nature Leads Children on Educational Hike at Roaring Brook School
On December 17th, the Student Initiative led a group of third and fourth grade children from Roaring Brook School on an educational hike through the Roaring Brook Nature Trail.
The "Student Initiative to Reintroduce the Community to Nature" is a club dedicated to increasing community access to well maintained nature trails and to making these trails more fun and attractive for local families. The club has roughly 50 student members who have contributed over 125 hours of cumulative community service in aid to the Avon Land Trust and local elementary schools.
On Saturday, December 17th, the club led a group of third and fourth grade children from Roaring Brook School on an educational hike through the Roaring Brook Nature Trail, which is located immediately behind the school. The children engaged in a scavenger hunt that taught them local history, ecology, and fun facts about the environment. Following compass directions, the children explored the trail and had to find hidden questions at several sites on it. The children were broken up into groups, each of which was accompanied by two trained Student Initiative members. In addition, they were taught survival skills and engaged in teamwork to build a lean-to that could fit them all inside. The purpose of this event was to have kids enjoy themselves in a natural setting while still learning and expanding their worldview. By giving children positive associations with nature, the club hopes to combat the drastic underexposure to the outdoors among the youngest generation. The response of the children was overwhelmingly positive, and they fully enjoyed and learned from the experience.
The trail itself has also been set and cleared by the Student Initiative over the course of the last few months as an ongoing project. Adult supervision at the event was provided by Mr. Larry Sparks, the assistant principal of Roaring Brook School, as well as Mr. Roger Kirschen, a former educator, and Mr. Michael Marella, a Science teacher at Avon High School. However, the event was fully organized and run by the Student Initiative and its members. The club is using the trail at Roaring Brook school as a testing area for ideas that it hopes to eventually bring to the rest of the trails in Avon and the Farmington Valley. These include "QR" codes, which are codes linking to videos that would provide a quided tour of the trail and can be accessed at the site by anyone with a smartphone.