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L.A.N.D.S. Field Trip with Texas Wildlife Association

Last week we took our honors 7th and 8th grade classes to a field trip with the Texas Wildlife Association.  They have a program called L.A.N.D.S. which is an acronym for Learning Across New Dimensions in Science.

The field trip was held at a ranch that was nearby our school called Warren Ranch.  I actually taught two of the Warren children over the last couple of years.

When we arrived the students were all split up into 4 different stations.  Each station had a set of volunteer experts at it.  They led a workshop for 30 minutes at each station.

Station 1 was called Quail CSI.  The purpose of this station was to try and determine what predators were eating the quail eggs on our ranch.  The volunteers had setup 4 different fake quail nests, and the students had to investigate the egg shells that were left behind to determine what predator had gotten into the nests.

There was also an area setup with flour all around a can of tuna fish.  This was setup to show how ranchers try to capture tracks of the predators as they came in for the food at night.

Station 2 was a surface water and ground water demonstration.  This is a middle school TEKS in Texas and was a great demonstration for the students to see.

The volunteers had setup 4 different buckets to represent different types of landscaping on the surface.  There was one with soil and no plants, one with soil and small plants, one with rocky soil, and one was a surface that represented a concrete parking lot.  The contraption simulated rain and each of the buckets had a spout for either surface water or groundwater.

The volunteers also had a life-size poster of a switchgrass (prairie grass) that showed the deep root system.   They told us that these grasses could survive just about anything including droughts and fires.  We also got to eat a berry from a tree that numbed our mouths.

The 3rd station was all about land management and how ranchers had to be stewards of the land or else the ecosystem could take a turn for the worst.  They talked about managing the land with fire, axes, cattle, and plows.  The conversation was just getting good when I had to deal with a student that had feinted from the heat.  She was fine after some water, food, and a short trip back to the school.

The 4th station was a game that the volunteers had setup to show the interaction between predators and prey.  In this case the predators were hawks, and farm cats, and the prey were quail.  The students had a lot of fun trying to hunt for candy and not get eaten by the predators.  You can see me as the  hawk below.  I’ve done a more detailed write-up about this fun activity here.

We had some lunch and then did our last activity as and entire group.  The last activity was that we all had to sit and listen for all of the sounds around us in total silence for 15 minutes.  The 8th graders did a great job with this.  They had to write down what they were hearing and draw them out if they could.

After the 15 minutes was up they broke off into groups and had to write a rap, song, or poem about it.  Everyone did a great job, and some of our students did what I would consider to be exceptional job.  We shared our work with each other at the end and then headed home.

It was a great day on the ranch.

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