Hiking through the forest, listening to birds chirping overhead, smelling moss-covered trees and feeling the crunch of leaves underfoot: It’s the kind of stuff camp was made for.
Activate Your Forest Senses, at the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre, is a program that aims to help kids explore the natural world around them.
“It’s about using all your different senses to learn what’s going on in the forest,” says Tricia Edgar, education programmer. “We’re going to be doing different sensory activities, so getting to know the forest through our senses and getting to know what’s happening in it using our senses, and also we’ll probably talk a little bit about how animals use their senses in the forest.”
The camp, which started last year and runs over the last few days of Spring Break, encourages children to use more than just their eyes.
“People tend to be quite eye-oriented creatures,” says Edgar “There’s some games that I play with the kids a lot that involve using your ears and also sort of widening your vision so that you can see things out of the corner of your eye because when you are looking for things in the forest usually people tend to look straight in front of them but a lot of the stuff that’s going on is on the side of your vision.”
Edgar says the kids often decide where and what in the park they want to explore.
“Often we end up in the same part of the park for three days running because they really liked it the first time,” says Edgar.
The ecology centre is also offering another program called Buzzing Bees, hosted by North Vancouver-based Two Bees Apiary, which gives families the chance to get up close and personal with native honeybees, talk about how to support local bees and learn the basics of beekeeping with hands-on materials.
“It’s for families so it’s a little bit different from a lot of Spring Break programs,” says Edgar, noting that children not only come with their parents, but also grandparents and other caregivers.
Edgar says kids are always interested in bees, or at least a little afraid of them.
“They’re kind of like worms. Bees and worms are two things that children are always quite aware of in their environment,” she says.
This story originally appeared in our Kids Biz Spring Break feature.
