Sixth-graders explore science of the forest in Cambria’s Strawberry Canyon

It was a watershed moment for Santa Lucia Middle School students: planting Monterey pine trees Monday in Cambria’s Strawberry Canyon.

There’s a double meaning there, because the students in Danielle Narzisi’s sixth-grade class have been learning about the Santa Lucia Creek watershed as part of their environmental education class at the Cambria middle school.

It’s part of a pilot program in which the school is partnering with Greenspace — The Cambria Land Trust on a series of four field trips this quarter. Monday’s field trip was the third of the four, with Greenspace Project Director Rick Hawley helping to guide the students through a series of activities designed to help them gain a better understanding of the forest.

“We learned about forest pathology and learned a lot about the insects that bore into trees,” Hawley said. “We took seed out of pine cones, and we planted about 100 seeds in these little cells, and when they get big enough, we’ll plant them” in the ground.

Later, the kids took the next step with some seedlings that had matured to the point that they were ready to plant. Teams of two took shovels and eagerly awaited Hawley’s instructions as he demonstrated how to complete the process.

“This is not an Easter egg hunt,” he said as some of the kids jumped the gun and ran downhill, eager to start digging.

Hawley explained they needed to don gloves to guard against poison oak roots that might be lurking below ground — and be sure not to rub the gloves on their faces or other exposed skin.

And when not using shovels, they needed to be placed facedown to guard against injury.

One of the students was overheard telling her partner about a painful personal episode that illustrated the danger: “I stepped on a rake, and it flew up into my nose, and it made my nose bleed,” she said. “It hit me straight across my whole face.”

Once the children had planted their seedlings, Hawley told them, “With any amount of luck, this tree will grow to be 100 feet tall.”

“Rick’s doing a really great job just letting them explore, asking them questions and getting them to think about what the answers might be,” Narzisi said as the group walked up a hill toward the planting site. “(He’s) encouraging their curiosity but also giving them some really good information. I think they’re really enjoying the variety of activities.”

Indeed, planting trees was just one portion of Monday’s field trip, which began at 8 a.m. with Hawley telling the students about the history of the forest and concluded around 2 p.m. Other activities included:

▪  Retrieving seeds from pine cones.

▪  Observing bugs under pine bark.

▪  Drawing the bugs in an exercise supervised by Greenspace Director Art Van Rhyn and Sara Blair Field.

▪  A quiet time of listening and observing the sounds and sights of the forest.

Ann Cichowski, who created the program along with Greenspace Executive Director Connie Gannon and Greenspace Director Dave Bidwell, explained how it came to fruition.

“I’ve worked in various communities with lumber companies, and I modeled this after a program I did with Weyerhaeuser in Washington state,” she said. “We wanted the students to really get involved and understand more about the different sections of the watershed.

“We’re beginning early with young people. We were involved in Seattle with recycling, and that’s where we started — with the young — and, hopefully, the young start teaching the old.”

Cichowski added that the field trips reinforce the scientific method by giving students the opportunity to do “basic testing” on water and soil samples. For instance, Hawley said, one activity Monday involved testing the soil for nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and pH levels.

Cichowski said the first field trip took the students to a consumer-supported agriculture farm on Santa Rosa Creek. (She explained that a CSA farm takes on “subscribers” and, rather than engaging in mass production, supplies only as much food as those subscribers ask for.)

The second field trip, in January, took half the students to the top of the Santa Rosa Creek watershed, while the other half went to the bottom at Shamel Park. Greenspace Director Wayne Attoe and Dawn Dunlap explained the history of the watershed to the students, pointing out that it had been used for 10,000 years by local inhabitants including the Chumash and Salinas tribes, Cichowski said.

Monday’s field trip was to be followed the next day by a classroom presentation on the forest ecosystem, courtesy of a UC Santa Cruz biologist.

The final field trip, set for May 23, will take students to the Coastal Discovery Center at San Simeon Bay, where they will study invertebrates along the shoreline.

Cichowski said each field trip features a 3-to-1 student-to-adult ratio, allowing each class member to receive plenty of personalized guidance: “If you can get people excited about something, you have so many people who will come out and help,” she said.

The environmental education program is one of four components in a yearlong rotating curriculum that also includes one quarter each in band, art and computers, Narzisi said. By the end of the school year, she said, every sixth-grader at Santa Lucia will have been exposed to each of the four units.

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 11:34 AM with the headline "Sixth-graders explore science of the forest in Cambria’s Strawberry Canyon."