This morning 30 more children are eager to learn what a Keystone Species is and earn the last of our charms for a bracelet. I’m off to the John Muir Mountain Day Camp to teach about beavers and make bracelets. It is my grand fortune to be there with Frank Helling who cheerfully portrays Muir every year and talks to the kids about his life. Fortune is contagious apparently: he came down with Igor after the 2008 Earth Day event and watched a half dozen beavers with Cheryl Reynolds on hand to explain what he was seeing. He still talks about that magical night!
Since there are less of us this time to go around I thought of a new plan. I’ll do the presentation for the first “tribe”, and ask questions at the end. The lucky 6 answers will become “charm captains” (you know a beaver captain, a salmon captain, a key captain, and so on) and then they’ll go off to make sure the other 9 children ‘earn’ that particular charm. Jon will be there to link them onto a bracelet and the lucky kids will get a shiny souvenir of their day learning about beavers. Meanwhile I’ll be presenting to the second ‘tribe’ and getting new charm captains for the second wave. Repeat this three times. This way the children teach each other and the odds of being remembered go wayyyyyy up.
We had just enough for 30 leftover which means I did 95 bracelets at the festival. No wonder we felt busy! Here’s a nice ‘teaching children’ video if you haven’t seen it in a while.
