Fifth Grade Project Educates Community About Nature Trails

ORLEANS – Students at Orleans Elementary School want to teach you all about the town’s many local trails.

 Fifth grade students at OES are working with the Orleans Conservation Trust on an ongoing project to provide information at the numerous trails under its stewardship. This fall, QR codes have been posted at kiosks at four trails that, when accessed by a smartphone, will link users to informational projects about the trail prepared by students.

 “It’s a way of informing the general population about work that kids are doing here in town about their town, and also inspire other people in town to take time to reflect on their natural world,” said Cirrus Farber, who along with fellow OES teacher Allan Peterson kickstarted the project with last year’s fifth graders.

 Students spent last year visiting and researching OCT trails at Mill Pond Valley, Paw Wah Point, Icehouse Pond and John Kendrick Woods. During each visit, they observed their surroundings and wrote about what they saw in different forms, including poetry and prose. Their writings were complimented by sketches and paintings that they did in art class.

At the end of the year, the students’ writings and art work were assembled into posters, which Farber and Peterson then turned into slideshows. Those slideshows were eventually linked to the QR codes that are posted at each trail for visitors to see.

 “I think it’s exciting for them, because they’re used to just seeing their work in the school lens,” Farber said.

“It’s ownership,” Peterson added.

The ongoing project is being funded through annual grants of approximately $1,000 offered to the school through the trust, which also gave grants to the elementary and middle schools to establish outdoor classrooms fronting Boland Pond. The project will continue each year with the end goal of every trust trail having a QR code that can be publicly accessed.

OES Principal Elaine Pender said the trail project is an example of the school’s growing focus on deeper learning. Part of that includes experiential projects that get students out of the classroom and more in touch with their surroundings.

“Kids need to be stewards of their environment,” she said. “They need to make authentic connections to the things they’re learning and why they’re important.

The project also serves as a means of connecting students to the broader community, Pender said. It can be easy for students’ work to go unnoticed by adults, especially those without children in the Nauset schools, she said. But the trail project has exposed the work being done by elementary students to the town at large.

“There are people walking the trails that are as passionate about these places as our kids are,” she said. “This is a shared appreciation, so this is something that will link someone who’s walking on the path to our children.”

The cross-disciplinary project touches upon core subjects such as science, English and art. But beyond academics, Farber and Peterson say there’s value for students in just getting them out into nature. Orleans is a town surrounded by trails, parks and water, but that doesn’t mean that all students are taking full advantage of it, they said.

“Probably a quarter of the kids have never been on these trails, at least,” Peterson said.

“For us, it’s a way to get these students out,” Farber said. “We’d like to think that all these families are taking their kids out on these trails, but that’s not necessarily the case.”

Peterson said students are given a lot of freedom to write and construct their projects the way they want to. That more open approach has helped students better engage with their work, he said. 

The project has also been beneficial to the teachers involved. Farber said the project has been a good exercise in reexamining nature “through a child’s eyes.”

“They see things that you don’t notice,” she said. “On the walk the other day through Kent’s Point, we were meandering down the trails and one of the girls yells ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a frog!’ It’s those kinds of simple joys that you don’t appreciate as you age.”

For the trust, which has 15 trail systems in town under its protection, the trail project is a way of helping foster an appreciation for the local environment in students at a young age, realizing that they will be its next generation of stewards. Farber said it’s also a reminder of the shared investment that people of all ages have in the natural world around them.

“Nature can inspire us in different ways if we just pause and think about it,” she said