Kids Build Science Skills With Secrets of the Forest

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The abundant Northwest forests hold four-seasons of secrets just waiting to be revealed by curious kids bent on making collections. The litter on the forest floor holds a rich assembly of eggshells, worm castings -- and everything that falls to the floor over the course of a year.

The forest floor gives many clues, indicators of what lives there. In the process of uncovering clues, kids begin to develop necessary science skills.

Jolene Hinrichsen, science-education researcher at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, says looking at the forest floor can be like a detective game for kids, trying to figure out what birds and animals lived there, and how many.

To find the clues, adults and kids can poke through a pile of litter, separating it into piles of items that have something in common -- leaves and bones, for example.

Using a simple magnifying hand lens, costing anywhere from $2 to $10, there may be surprises in store. "You're looking at a leaf," says Jolene, "and all of a sudden it's hairy. Where did those hairs come from?"

Northwest forests and woodlands provide a variety of items for kids to find, collect, organize, and classify. There are leaves, rocks, crystals, feathers, eggshells, bones, scat (droppings), fur, seeds, and tracks.

One way for kids to collect tracks (footprints), says Jolene, is to draw what they see. Drawing helps to enrich the experience. Another way is to make casts to bring home.

"Making a cast is simple," says Jolene. Here's how: Mix water and plaster of paris to the proper thickness, pour it into the track, level it, and let it dry. (Usually it takes about a half hour or less to set up.) If you make castings of different tracks, then you and the kids might speculate as to what animals made the prints- a deer? a cow? It's also fun to talk about why the prints are the same or different from each other, and to guess the weight of the animal.

Fur provides yet another possibility for making a collection, says Jolene. Many animals rub trees, or in bedding down for the night, they leave pieces of fur behind. Scientists look at fur and scat collections to track animals.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal recently told the story of a zoologist who is heading the Great Grizzly Search, looking for just such evidence of grizzly bears in the Bitteroot mountain range that borders Montana and Idaho.

Jolene points out that most of the forests in Alaska, Idaho, and Montana, are coniferous (cone bearing) - cedar, spruce, pine, hemlock, fir, for example. Oregon and Washington woodlands and parks also are rich with oak, maple, and dogwood trees which are deciduous, loosing their leaves each year. Seeds, such as acorns and pinecones, offer good potential for collecting.

One of the great things about making forest collections, says Jolene, is that kids can make one for each of the seasons. And parks, because they have mostly deciduous trees, are productive sources for leaf collections.

Collections, Jolene points out, are a great way to open the door to science, inviting kids to become members of this exciting enterprise of research and discovery.

This column by Karen Lytle Blaha is provided as a public service by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit institution working with schools and communities in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.