Mettawee Community School Partnership Update

By Chris Hubbard, Education Director

Over the past several months, Merck Forest staff has been working with the Mettawee Community School faculty to deliver professional development focused on outdoor education. As Project Learning Tree facilitators, we were able to deliver PLT training to teachers, providing them with a resource that focuses on trees and forests as a conduit for cross-cutting standards-aligned environmental lessons. In addition, teachers were provided with information on conducting lessons outside safely in winter, identifying animal tracks and signs, nature journaling activities, and the use of Seed, a student-friendly app that helps to identify mammals, plants, and insects in the wild.

This spring we continue our work with Patty Lea, Sheryl Porrier, and their 6th grade students as the students create a nature trail to leave to the younger Mettawee students. We’re getting them out onto our satellite campus, learning about land stewardship, observing and documenting the natural world, and exploring the natural communities. It’s exciting to get out on the land with students as they discover what is just a few steps from their classrooms, as we continue our partnership with Mettawee Community School.

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.“

Thanks to your support, our resource managers have updated on-property practices to ensure that we are living by our values while our field educators have developed a suite of new events and workshops intended to showcase the organization’s land ethic and demonstrate how that ethic is exemplified through various projects around the farm and forest.

Many of these new programs - including ecological workshops, youth summer camp offerings, and spectacular citizen science opportunities, are in play. Now, the team is turning its focus to developing materials and educational waypoints that will facilitate more meaningful self-guided exploration within a mile of the Visitor Center. Simply put, the objective is to provide new and exciting answers to an essential question that we often hear from visitors: “What should I do while I’m here?”

With your continued support, we plan to enhance the educational experience that visitors have within one mile of the Visitor Center by:

• continuing our efforts (displayed on the opposite page) to highlight the natural communities and diversify accessible demonstration work in the nearby woods and on the farm

• developing new analog and digital resources to guide visitors through a series of reflection points on the landscape

• installing new interpretive waypoints that highlight interesting facts and encourage visitors to reflect on topics ranging from watershed health to carbon storage

• creating an “ecologist-for-a-day” program that will provide visitors with tools and information to get out onto the land and contribute to our citizen science driven effort to catalogue the many species that call Merck Forest home

• enhancing the area around the Visitor Center to improve visitor orientation and provide better spaces to learn, relax, and enjoy the splendor of these woods

Help us meet this goal! We welcome contributions to help underwrite this project. For more information, contact the Advancement Office at liz@merckforest.org or at 802-394-2579.