Gearing up to travel in Big Blue!
Ale’a & Charity with the class exercise from Environmental Science that anchors this post
1: BAOBABS
“Heartbeat of a Tree” meditation
Students have been practicing field journaling for at least 40 minutes at a time per week to enhance their scientific understanding (no artistic skill required!). What better organism to examine up close than the baobab, some of which are thousands of years old, and what better place than Botswana, home to the largest concentration of baobabs in the world? Nestled in the roots of these bizarrely beautiful trees, students have shared that this practice has been more than scientific– for many, it’s become meditative. After a sunrise run for Physical and Outdoor Fitness class, students participated in a meditation we called “heartbeat of a tree,” in which they felt their beating pulse with one hand while placing their palm on a baobab trunk with the other and contemplated the fact that, while these giants were here long before us and will remain long after we are gone, in this present moment we are living, breathing, and interconnected.
Photos from the Baobab section of their Science poster – click to zoom in.
2: MEERKATS
Cows, horses, ostriches, and elephants drink together at a watering hole.
Meerkats!
Olive gets up close and personal
En route to the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, we stopped at a watering hole where cows, horses, ostriches, and elephants drank together in a dreamlike meeting of the domestic and wild animal kingdoms. Though this wasn’t the main event, we were headed to a human-sensitized meerkat colony! This colony is taken care of by a man named Shepard, and he welcomed us into his little world, introducing us to the main characters: Papa, Cinderella, Alex, and the newest addition, Paul, a baby meerkat born not three months earlier. The students cautiously walked up to the meerkats as they frantically dug for bugs, expecting them to skitter away in fright, but were met by no such fear. The meerkats happily went on digging, totally unconcerned with the massive biped looming over them. Within five minutes, all the students were down on the ground, inches away from these creatures, observing their oddly humanoid mannerisms. Shepard was a wealth of knowledge and spent 45 minutes discussing his observations and answering questions from the students regarding diet, mating, family structure, predators, personalities, and everything in between. Though no meerkats crawled on anyone’s head, we left the colony thoroughly enamored with one the Lion King’s most compelling characters.
Questions and learnings from the Meerkat section of their poster
3. SALT PANS
Their guide, Ms. K, gives students a geology lesson in the Pans
The surreal landscape puts it into perspective!
Behind the scenes
After our whimsical journey through the animal kingdom, we spent a night out on the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, “the great nothing full of everything” as described by our female guide. To get there, we held on tight as we bumped along down sandy roads, passing bulging baobabs and towering termite mounds– Environmental Science class from a safari rig! Once on the Pans, we learned about the ecology of this surreal landscape, where students played soccer, took perspective-bending photos, and shared heartwarming gratitudes around the fire. I think it was here where the shock of where they found themselves began to sink in; one student exclaiming, “If somebody told me in January that I’d be sleeping under the stars on a huge salt pan in the middle of the African continent, I would have never, ever believed them!” The joy of the group was infectious, and the four elderly Californians also on this excursion shared their excitement and appreciation to see such smart and engaged young people in such a landscape.
The students fell asleep under a dome of stars, and awoke to greet an epic sunrise, toasted to with hot chocolate.
The fine art of flashlight writing
Sunrise on the Pans
Questions and learnings from the Salt Pans
Next Steps for Learning
Upon arrival at our latest campground, students put their heads together to level up their higher order thinking, framing the follow-up inquiries pictured to ask SMART questions: Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Repeatable, and Timely. This practice opportunity, combined with their field journaling skills, lays the groundwork for their first science project: a collaborative investigation of elephant behavior using the scientific method! Observations are underway, and students are mesmerized by these creatures with whom we share a complicated present.
To pre-brief, students listened to and discussed Episode 2, “Ghost Elephants of Lisima”, from the Guardians of the River podcast about the Okavango, whose watershed we will continue to travel through for place-based learning. Check it out as another way to learn alongside us from across the globe!
– Grace, Logistics Coordinator and Lead Teacher
Grace
Sophie Love-Webb (teacher) and Olive
Taran
Learning with maps!
