FIELD NOTES BLOG

Bringing Nature to Schools: After School Programs with 21st Century Community Learning Centers

Andrea Wallace
December 18, 2023

We are a few weeks into an exciting new program and community partnership with 21st Century Community Learning Centers! From now until mid-April, our education team is bringing hands-on nature experiences to Welsh, Haskell, and West View Elementary schools in Rockford every week. Students will use binoculars, build habitat models, play predator-prey games, experiment with bird beak shapes, roleplay the water cycle, and so much more! These after school programs give us the ability to reach students who might not otherwise have access to Severson Dells or Natural Areas. Ongoing programs like this have an added appeal because we can better develop relationships with the students. We are thrilled to have this opportunity. 

The students seem equally excited! Here’s what they have had to say so far:

“You are only coming out for 18 weeks? Why can’t it be 800 weeks!”

“You mean we are going to learn about ALL of those animals?! For real?!”

“Do you really have to leave now? Can we keep doing this?”

“Thank you for this experience.”

“You invited me to Science Saturday at Severson Dells. I went with my family and it was SO MUCH FUN! I can’t wait to go to Luminaria this weekend.”

“I can see the hawk’s talons through the binoculars! Just like you were talking about inside!”

The joy and wonder on kids’ faces as they handled pelts and furs for the first time was contagious. Their curiosity was palpable. These things are hard to quantify, though, and we strive to show data-driven success as a result of our program. We asked students to complete a pre-evaluation to benchmark their attitudes toward Science and Nature. Students ranked their response to various statements like “I know a lot about nature” on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “strongly disagree” and 5 being “strongly agree.” Here’s what we found:

Many students showed that they like being in nature, with the average of responses being a 4.08 (agree). A lot of them enjoy learning about nature and science. Fewer students felt like they know a lot about nature and are good at science, with average responses for those statements being 3.57 and 3.38 (not sure). We hope to see these attitudes trend toward “strongly agree” or 5 in our end-of-program evaluation! 

We have tons of in-depth and interactive lessons about local wildlife planned for these after-school programs, but we wanted to see what knowledge our students were starting with. We presented students with several animal pictures and asked them to circle which animals live in or around Rockford. We considered Deer, Fox, Rabbit, Raccoon, and Frog as present in and around Rockford while Tiger, Bear, and Alligator as not. The following chart shows the percentage of correct responses per animal. 

Students were fairly confident that Tigers do not live around Rockford, which is a relief for multiple reasons! Students also performed well on their assessment of Rabbit and Raccoon presence in Rockford. However, over half of the students are convinced that Deer are not present locally, and almost half believe the same about Fox. 

This data tells the story of our students’ disconnect with the natural world and local ecosystems. They aren’t alone in this, though! Some chaperones who come to Severson Dells for field trips ask if they need to be concerned about lions and tigers and bears (oh my!). Many factors have hindered our connection with and understanding of the natural world. We aim to further our mission of “connecting people to nature” through these programs. If we do our job well, these percentages should be much higher by the end of our program. 

We hope to keep you updated with stories and pictures from these programs, and I am especially looking forward to seeing the results of the post-evaluations. For now, consider supporting this effort with a donation to Severson Dells or volunteering at our other community outreach programs! Thank you for following this journey. 

RECENT ARTICLES

Happy National Make-A-Will Month

By Linda Sandquist • August 7, 2025
As we observe National Make-A-Will Month this August, I want to relate a personal story about preparing my own will. Have you ever heard the saying “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”? Up until a month ago, this statement described me since my husband is a lawyer and we had no will or estate plan. I counted myself in good company when I learned that Abraham Lincoln, Picasso, Sonny Bono, and Aretha Franklin all died without a will. And I had a lot in common with the 72% of Americans who have not officially spelled out what should happen to their assets upon their death. Wills and estate plans are easy to put off. They feel too complicated, too time-consuming and too official. And frankly it’s not much fun to think about who should get what, knowing that at least one person is going to be disappointed and someone will most likely think they were left with the short end of the stick. While a will can’t soothe hurt feelings, one with a named executor will speed up the probate process and ensure that your wishes are fulfilled. Creating a will doesn’t have to be time-consuming or difficult - there are many resources online to help you write a document that needs only to be witnessed and notarized. The resources I found were free, very helpful, and very legal. Steps were simplified and I completed my will in less than an hour. If your wishes are more complicated, finding an estate attorney is also easy and can be very affordable. Another benefit of making a will or estate plan is that you get to decide what charities and nonprofit organizations will receive a final gift from you. If you’ve been a passionate supporter of something over your lifetime, wouldn’t you like to give them a final gift that really means something? It’s easy to direct a certain dollar amount or a certain percentage of your estate to an organization you really care about. And the organization is bound by law to follow your intentions - you can choose whether you want your gift to go to a certain program, operations and overhead, building maintenance, or an endowment fund. Equally as impactful, is making your favorite charitable organization the beneficiary of your retirement fund, IRA, or life insurance policy. Here at Severson Dells Nature Center, we ask that you consider including us in your estate plans. When you do, you become part of our Heritage Society, a group of like-minded folks, dedicated to the future of nature education in our region. Your gift, large or small, will make a difference. In 2016, a bequest from Orville and Ruth Varland to Severson Dells created an endowment fund to support field trips for students from the Rockford Public Schools. The fund has grown over time and continues to make a difference in the lives of young people who come to the Dells, many experiencing nature for the first time. Each year, students who have never been in a forest, seen a natural creek, or sat in the grass are here because of the Varlands. The legacy of Orville and Ruth lives on and on and on. I invite you to celebrate and Make-A-Will this month. Take the time to look for online resources or contact your attorney. Make sure your intentions are clearly written down so that when the time comes, there is no question about what you wanted. Please consider including Severson Dells in your will and join our Heritage Society. And let us know that you included us so we can thank and celebrate you now! If you've already considered Severson Dells in your estate plans, let us know! Email me at linda@seversondells.org or call me at 815-335-2915. * Please note: Severson Dells Education Foundation is not a legal entity and cannot give legal advice. We encourage you to seek out legal advice should you have any questions about the process of making a will or leaving an estate gift. Our Tax ID number is 36-2985870

Summer Storms: Meteorology and our Local Environment

By Sydney Sherbitsky • July 16, 2025
Summer days have an intense energy. For us, it’s easy to pack a lot of activity into long, sunlight-filled days. The atmosphere is packed in a different way, with thick, heavy humidity and sun-baked heat. You have probably experienced one of these particularly sweltering days where periods of calm are interrupted with a sudden summer storm. One moment you are relaxing, the next, you hear the rumbling of thunder, and it begins to rain, instantly cooling the hot ground and taking the stickiness from the air. You don’t have long to take in the scene as the intensity of the heat gives way to an intense storm. This is a different kind of energy in the air; this is a summer storm.

Nature's Blueprint

By Shannon Osadjan • July 3, 2025
Nature holds the answers for how to be more efficient with managing our supplies of earth’s natural resources. In fact, nature serves as the inspiration and blueprint for many structures and objects we use every day! Biomimicry is a practice of engineering that creates designs based on structures and sequences from the Earth’s natural world, including but not limited to plants, animals, and geographies. Biomimicry designs are meant to imitate functions that already exist and occur in nature. These designs are being transferred over and scaled up to provide solutions to human caused problems. There are three main core principles that make up biomimicry: recreating natural shapes, processes, and entire ecosystems.