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LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS Sterling Strathe LEAF Program Director I was recently writing excerpts about my life in one of those guided journaling books for my kids called “Dad Tell Me the Time About…” It started the usual way. You know—where were you born, your parents name, but by page 10 the questions were retrieving some serious childhood memories. I grew up on a farm in central Iowa— a boy of the 60’s. Non-school days were spent playing outside. I was never bored. I don’t think I had ever heard the word used in that context. I was too busy building forts in the hay mow or gathering old boards and building a tree house in the grove or trying to float down stream on a homemade raft. My friends would ride their bikes a mile from town to come play, explore, and act out their childhood fantasies in the natural world that surrounded us. At night I might watch TV if there was a good show on one of the two channels our TV got. Many of those shows like the Lone Ranger, F Troop, or Combat just added to the script of the next day’s outdoor play. Many of you, I’m sure could conjure up some similar memories from your childhood. More than likely your childhood outdoor experiences had something to do with owning and caring for your land as you do today. Boy have times changed. Today’s youth are growing up in a very different world. Structured activities like soccer leagues and video games, computers, and I Pods have replaced the time kids used to creatively play outdoors. The increase in child abductions has limited the ability of kids to play even in the vacant lot across the street. A recent study showed that the range in which parents let their kids play unsupervised has decreased to 1/9th the size it was in 1990. As a result we have a generation (known as the Millennium Generation) growing up without discovering the great forests and waterways of this State and Nation. This group will need to play an important role in helping to support decisions to sustain our forests, yet this group knows more about the rain forests it has seen on TV. LEAF—Wisconsin’s K-12 Forestry Education Program was created to help address this problem. The program is a partnership effort between the Division of Forestry and the Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education at the College of Natural Resources at UWSP. The program worked through a public input process to identify the concepts students should know about Wisconsin’s forests and to develop unit-based lesson guides for use in the classroom. To get the lesson guides, teachers must participate in a workshop that provides them background information on Wisconsin’s forests, an introduction to the lesson guides, instructors who model teach some lessons, opportunities to team teach lessons, and discussions on infusing the materials into their classrooms. Workshops are offered statewide, and teachers can receive a subsidized graduate credit for attending. As local forest landowners, you too can help with this enormous challenge as LEAF sets out to add forestry education into the classroom. You can open the door for LEAF to your local district by telling parents, teachers, administrators, and school boards about this venture that was designed to meet the educational needs of the classroom and help sustain our precious forests. A member of the LEAF staff will gladly visit with you and your school about what materials and services LEAF can provide. To learn more about LEAF and how to contact us, check out the LEAF website at www.leafprogram.org. What the
Millennium Generation will someday write in their guided journal
“Tell Me About the Time When” is anyone’s guess. What we can be
sure of is unless we work to educate and involve this generation
with our forests, we will have a hard time sustaining them for the
long run. Together we can make a difference. Check out the LEAF
website and contact your school today. |
