Recently we have started to introduce a little more theory into our forest school events. That doesn't mean that we give proper clases, but we would like to explore certain biological / ecological concepts to our young explorers. We ran two events over the last two weeks where we explored the topic "habitat" a little closer. In order to be able to give a little theoretical introduction we stayed close to the office. Since we meanwhile have more than fourty local kids signed up for our expeditions we split the group in half and ran the same event twice within seven days.
First we discussed - as a group - what "habitat" means. Some of the participants already had a pretty good idea, so we only had to solidify the theoretical knowledge a little.
Afterwards we went into practise. We used a quadrat survey for that. On one square meter (randomly chosen by the groups) we did sampling of plant and animal life trying to find and identify as many species as we could. Then we characterized the square meters in terms of its abiotic conditions (humidity, luminosity, ...).
After bringing the samples to the "lab", we made drawings of the various plant species (we ID'ed down to family level) and used out new hand-held microscopes to also make the invertebrates a little more visible.
In total it was a beautiful excercise which we could repeat in less-disturbed habitats in the forest at some point.
