Animal Exploration: Environmental Education students give elementary schoolers guided nature tours

Peering down the third-floor hallway, elementary school students watched the snakes wiggle in the hands of SM East students in front of room 325 from their single file lines.

“Aaaaaah!”

Many of the children stopped in their tracks and ran in the opposite direction from the uncaged snakes.

Throughout the years, Environment Education teacher Rusty Debey has taught and prepared his students to lead annual nature tours — presentations given to elementary students visiting SM East to learn about various animals.

“We spend most of the [first] semester talking about animals, classification, characteristics, habitats [and] things that they studied through elementary school for years,” Debey said. “But then we kind of put it into practice second semester, in which they’ve got to make lesson plans.”

Before the tours begin, students are paired into groups and tasked with creating lessons on delivering information promptly about the specific animals they were assigned.

Whether it’s mammals or reptiles, or even an environmental group that talks about pollution, each group is paired by Debey to present and teach young students.

“They spend a whole week practicing on their own classmates, going through the different rotations, learning how to teach their subject [and] learn how to speak publicly,” Debey said.

Since starting the tours in early February, the Environmental Education students have taken turns giving different presentations to the young students, according to junior Ave Koeneman.

Each group shares the basic facts about their assigned animals while answering any questions the elementary school students might have.

“It’s been fun to be more involved with holding the animals, and the kids get really excited about that,” Koeneman said.

Junior Tatum Anderson had three presentation categories so far during the tours, which is the typical number throughout the three months of field trips. The presentations given during the rotations last for 10 minutes before the kids switch to the next group.

Anderson and the other Environmental Education students often teach children as young as five, which is a new experience for many.

“It’s a little chaotic, especially if there’s a lot of kids in the group,” Anderson said. “But most of them want to ask questions, and a lot of them are excited to learn.”

While the students are busy presenting, Debey overlooks and steps in when needed during the field trips, whether that’s helping a group with an absent member or adding extra facts into presentations.

“The high school students do a really good job working with the grade school kids, because the grade school kids are just like the high school kids,” Debey said. “We’ve all got all different kinds of learning levels and different abilities to do things, and everybody does it their way, but they still get the information across.”