Grade 2 and 3 students from Mrs. O’Malley’s multi-age class at Rossland Summit School spent Thursday morning playing in the snow and learning about winter ecology.
Jessica Williams, aka Frosty Flake, is an environmental educator with Wildsight and taught the Winter Wonder educational program to several classes from RSS.
“The students really love to get outside and experience all the adaptations animals and plants have to survive our Kootenay winters,” she said. “Its amazing what they can learn if they are given the opportunity to explore nature in the winter season. You can’t teach that in a classroom.”
The students learned about camouflage and adaptation, and how to identify footprints and scat. The program was also a great way to get them outside and enjoying the fresh air, and they had opportunities both to play games that reinforced their learning and to explore the world around them using what they’d learned.
Wildsight has offered education programs to over 60,000 kids in the Columbia Basin since the programs first began in 2001, and has been delivering Winter Wonder to schools for nine years. The program is free of charge and receives financial support from Columbia Basin Trust, FortisBC, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, the North Face Explore Fund, and the BC Gaming Commission.