Chattermarks

What happens at Mountain School does not just stay at Mountain School.

With winter’s silence embracing the landscape up at the Learning Center, the laughter of Mountain School students seems all but a distant echo, fading as the Skagit flows down valley. The excitement, the energy, travels wherever the students fare. And where they fare is their respective home grounds.

The first few weeks of December mark post-trip visitation time to participating schools of the fall season’s Mountain School. Several of North Cascades Institute’s graduate students have traveled north to Bellingham to visit Carl Cozier Elementary, Geneva Elementary, Wade King Elementary, Larrabee Elementary, Happy Valley Elementary, Whatcom Hills Waldorf School, and Birchwood Elementary. Others have traveled south to Bellevue and Bothell to check-in with the Eton School and Evergreen Academy.

» Continue reading Bringing Mountain School back home

You can feel them approaching. It is a surge of energy, a tidal wave of enthusiasm and wonder, about to overtake this place. The momentary quiet of the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center awaits eagerly the arrival of giggles and shouts, of singing and learning once more. Standing in the parking lot on a Monday or Wednesday afternoon, we, as instructors, can anticipate only so much. Backpacks are stuffed to the brim with daily supplies and previous nights are spent late, preparing for the next day’s activities.

It isn’t about us, though. As students arrive, whether by bus or by car, with gaping grins of glee and eyes wide with wonder, every time a Mountain School tidal wave hits, we are reminded—it is about these students and this place.

» Continue reading This place, through their eyes

One of the trickiest parts of being an instructor during a Mountain School session is how to properly transition from boisterous, high-energy games and songs to more quiet, less obviously engaging activities. Too abrupt a change and the high energy spills over into the supposed-to-be quiet activity. Since the boisterous activities are often fun equally for the instructor and for the students, a tendency can emerge for the instructor to concentrate so much on the attraction of group interaction that the interaction between student and nature can suffer. By their “nature,” these latter, quieter activities have more reaching power, in terms of having the students directly encounter the close-by wonders of the world outside. Underlying all of this, too, is the goal of increasing observation skills, those of both the students and the instructor.

Here’s where the students can teach you something as well.

Students & chaperones from Fidalgo Elementary enjoying a Mountain School campfire

So what does this have to do with a magic moment? During campfire program a couple rainy weeks ago, students, instructors and chaperones were having the usual time of our lives singing songs at the top of our lungs, interpreting legends via skits, laughing and enjoying the fire and company. The warmth of the company and activities concentrated everyone’s attention on the human world within the glow of the campfire. Rebecca then led a wonderful transition activity, a “rain circle,” in which participants mimic the sounds of different levels of rainfall. This is accomplished through the rubbing of hands together, clapping with two fingers, snapping, full-hand clapping and slapping one’s thighs.  The leader transitions sounds from a falling mist to a downpour then back to a falling mist.

» Continue reading Magical Mountain School moments

This spring I was given the task of organizing and coordinating Mountain School post-trip visits, where instructors visit the many classrooms of the students who participated in the program this season. These visits are designed to connect the students’ experience at the Learning Center with their lives in the classroom and at home.

» Continue reading Memories from Mountain School

The 2009 Spring Mountain School session has come to an end. For the members of Cohort 8 our days of teaching abiotic and biotic lessons in the North Cascades National Park are finished, thankfully only in the formal Mountain School sense. Microscope labs, web of life, silent hikes and glacier lessons are things of the past and the feeling is bitter sweet.

» Continue reading The end of the 2009 spring Mountain School

Spring Mountain School is so fun!  Middle school through high school students get to study forest carnivores, learn about and explore habitat around the learning center and they get to use field equipment.  How exciting is that?

» Continue reading Spring Mountain School

Spring Mountain School training is in full swing here at the learning center. Graduate students, rangers and staff have spent the last three days on the trails rehearsing new lessons about forest carnivores, early Pacific Northwest naturalists, field science techniques and the amazing biodiversity of the North Cascades ecosystem.

Starting the season off right we faced inclement, snowy weather this morning; post holed up to our knees in dense, wet snow and through it all relished the opportunity to be outside playing again and preparing for Mountain School.

Our first group of Mountain School students will arrive in just under two weeks. It will be energizing to have a campus full of students again. To hear squeals of delight at the sight of a Douglas squirrel, smell the campfire, listen to camp songs, and to see students out on the trails, exploring the natural world sounds fantastic. And to be doing so on our beautiful campus as spring arrives sounds even better.

How does one describe lichen to a fifth-grader? I’ve tried, many times, and often end up tongue-tied and bemused. With a hundred pairs of elementary eyes examining the forest each week during Mountain School season, it’s hard to walk 20 feet without a curious kid asking, “Where did that come from?” or “Why does that look like that?” And lichen seems to be one of those things that, although often disregarded by the adult eye, jumps out to a kid like a neon hippopotamus. “What’s that?!” Tell a group of students it’s a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga, and they won’t hesitate to point out that it looks nothing like a mushroom or a seaweed. And what does symbiosis mean?

» Continue reading The unlikely life of lichens

A few weeks after the last busload of 5^th graders pulled away from the Environmental Learning Center all of the instructors packed into an Institute van and headed down valley. We were on our way to Mount Vernon to hand-deliver Mountain School t-shirts to our students.

A Centennial student modeling his new Mountain School t-shirt.

» Continue reading Have you seen our new Mountain School t-shirts?

Wolf pups, from one of Conservation Northwest’s remote cameras.

Daylight Saving Time has sent the sun to bed early. I step out of my cabin to walk to dinner and the world has already slipped into pure night. It’s cold, my breath immediately plumes in the light of my headlamp. Small glowing circles form out of the lights from the other buildings down the hill, seemingly miles away. Through the trees I can barely see the glimmer of lights from the lake and the dam.

Out of the silent dark forest a strange eerie noise reaches my ears. Howls, a chorus of howls. Long and echoing in the new early darkness. Wolves? Yes, but just cubs of the human variety: our traditional “Meal Time!” call for Mountain School. Thirty 5th graders and a handful of adults calling out. Some are eager to howl, some take some coaxing. It’s all I can do not to join in. I love the howl.

» Continue reading Wolves