Tony Esposito NewsChannel 36 Production

Hello all, in last week's blog I wrote about my upcoming trip to Missouri to attend a meeting for state coordinators of the Leopold Education Project. This week I will share some of the highlights of the workshop.

At the airport, I met up with the rest of the workshop participants who had flown into Springfield from around the country. We loaded ourselves into the van, provided by the University of Missouri, and headed to the Bull Shoals Field Station. The Bull Shoals Field Station was about an hour's drive and located in Kirbyville, Missouri.

The workshop would showcase new lessons and activities for the Leopold Education Project and train the educators and facilitators. As State Coordinators, we are the ones who will hold the workshops to teach the new lessons to others.

The Leopold Project is involved with the No Child Left Inside Bill that was recently passed by Congress. This bill will offer opportunities to get children outside and away from the tv and computers. It will help eliminate "Nature Deficit Disorder", a term that Richard Louv uses in his book "Last Child In the Woods". Kids of today are not con-nected to nature and the outdoor experience. They stay inside spending up to six hours a day watching TV and playing on computers.

The Leopold Project has developed activities and lesson plans that will encourage chil-dren to spend time outside, be active, and have fun and learn about nature.

One of the new lessons is based on a GPS activity called Geo-Caching. Geo-Cashing is an activity where an item is placed somewhere in the world and the location is recorded with the GPS device. The coordinates are then published on the web or in books. It is one big scavenger hunt using the electronic device to find the item. There are thou-sands of Caches around the country and the world but many are located right in your home town.

The lesson plan I followed on my trip had me go out on a property and find an interest-ing object. On a piece of paper, ask a question about the object, then record the loca-tion with the GPS and leave the paper as a cache. I did the same thing for three objects. Then swapped the GPS units with the other teams and tried to find their objects using the GPS coordinates. This activity will get the children outside, create observational skills, and teach them about navigation. I am sure this activity will be popular with both children and adults.

Not all the new activities involved electronics or moving around. We learned about one exercise that will have the child go outside and be still and listen. They will write what they saw and heard. This activity, as simple as it is, raises the child's awareness of things around him and hopefully look at the world a little differently.

There are many more activities in the new program. All of them aim to get the children outside. Hopefully if they have a good time and they will want to be outside more.
If you are a teacher or a home educator and want more information about the Leopold Education Project, write to me at the station. I would be happy to tell you more about the program. My email address at the station is TEsposit@WCNC.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

---