2011 Conservation Daycamp a Success!

40 students attended, along with 4 teenaged counselors. The kids broke up into groups of 10 each and were escorted through a series of classes throughout the day. Couselors were Katie Hodges, Emily Barnhouse, Elias Vaughn, and Hannah Vaughn. Our camp nurse was Sandy Mahaffy.

Below, naturalist Myron Dellinger talks to the students about some of the more unusual pollinators they may have never thought of; like bats, mammals, hummingbirds, and flies.

Tie-dyed T-shirts dry in the warm air. Cambridge Art Guild member Anna Hodges and her daughter Karen taught this class.

SWCD technician Van Slack taught a class on native bees and their major role in pollination.
Wildlife specialist Joe Lehman led the kids on a hike to discuss habitat issues.

Retired Meadowbrook science teacher Dee Carter gives hands on instruction on how plants reproduce. Here, the students are disecting flowers from her garden to see how pollen and eggs get together to form the seeds. In this way, they learn first hand how important insects are in the process of reproduction.

Here, Dee and the kids are playing a game "Fruit or Not" to help the students understand how much of their food comes from plants and their seeds.

On the second day of the camp, all the kids, counselors, and volunteers got a bus tour of 'The Wilds". After the tour and lunch, we all came back to the district conference room and naturalist Judy Levicoff "the Butterfly Lady" told the kids all about the Monarch butterfly - the only butterfly that migrates. She had caterpillars and chrysalis for the kids to hold and examine, along with lots of pictures to show the process of metamorphosis.