When my wife, Karen, told me that she was bringing her first grade class to the pond in the North Burial Ground in Providence, I asked to meet them there.
Every other week last year, Karen took the same youngsters, then in kindergarten, to the pond to study it.
Now the children were learning geometrical shapes, and Karen was taking the kids back to the pond to use its natural setting to extend classroom lessons.
On an overcast 40-degree morning on the last day of November, 11 first-graders, plus two teachers, from the nearby Jewish Community Day School of Rhode Island (JCDSRI), arrived at the pond.
Before setting out, the teachers urged the students to take their time searching the landscape, and to look “very hard,” in order to find “some of the very cool” objects there.
To record their findings, the students shared iPads. So, when Millie found a black fungal ring on a fallen maple leaf, Meitel snapped the shot. After Ben showed his mates a square of bark on a tree trunk, Natan took the picture. And as Aden pointed out a triangle in a canopy created by crossed branches, Eden captured the image. The visit crossed disciplines, said Karen. Linking math and art, for example, she and co-teacher, Sarah, pointed out sides and corners within shapes, and spaces that surrounded shapes.
Sarah also shared the Hebrew names for shapes. Triangle, for example, was pronounced “meh-shoo-lahsh.”
For me the trip was a chance to observe six- and seven-year-olds connect with nature
On a grassy slope beside the pond, Zemer examined the triangular corners of a red oak leaf. Malcolm held up a cylindrical fallen branch. The tall evergreen across the pond was “one large cone,” said Bentzi. And, when Eshel found an oval-shaped growth of lichen on a boulder, Ben took a picture of the entire stone for context.
Geese poop, the class decided, was cylindrical. Gray birch not only had triangular leaves but triangular marks on its bark where branches fell off, said the kids.
As for the narrow seedpods hanging from a catalpa tree, those were “100” vertical lines, noted the children, who added that the pods dangling overhead looked “spooky, like long fingers.”
The outing was also an opportunity to ponder the unseen, such as when students learned that the tiny, perfectly round holes on the bark of a sugar maple tree served as entrances and exits for beetles that lived under the bark.
The kids came and went via a little white bus driven by a JCDSRI employee named Peter, who helped the teachers usher the kids aboard.
The scene brought to mind the book, “Make Way for Ducklings,” in which Boston police shepherd Mrs. Mallard and her brood to the pond in Boston Public Garden.
Here in Providence, teachers and protectors led a line of little ones in fun and joyfulness in a landscape filled with an abundance of detail.
— Scott Turner’s (scottturnerster@gmail.com) nature column appears here most Fridays.