Our Place Worth Protecting: How Three Grades Learned to Care for the Hill They Love

by Allyssa Castellini, K-6 STEM Teacher with Mountain Views Supervisory Union

Every Friday for eight years, Woodstock's preschoolers have hiked up to the same patch of forest on Mount Peg. They call it Forest Fridays, and their favorite part of it, hands down, is sliding down the hill on their backsides.

It's also what was slowly wrecking the hill.

"The kids love Mount Peg, they love being there, they love exploring, they love building," said Jaqueline Thomason, the pre-K teacher. "And what we're noticing is that our impact on the space is making it so that we might not be able to use this space, because if we take all the soil off of the roots of the trees, then that tree is not going to be able to be standing."

Years of small feet and small choices, sliding, wandering off the trail, had left bare dirt where plants used to hold the soil in place. So this year, Thomason’s preschoolers partnered with students from the CRAFT program at Woodstock Union High School, who came in to teach lessons on native plants and root systems, then returned for a planting day. Later, high schoolers helped the youngest kids mark a trail within the forest, showing them where it was safe to walk without trampling new growth. Around 100 native grasses and flowers went into the ground.

Then Woodstock's third graders, taught by STEM teacher Alyssa Castellini, took on a job of their own: telling the story, because the preschoolers were too young to tell it themselves.

"The third graders really took ownership of finding out what happened," Castellini said. "They interviewed the preschoolers, they went up to Mount Peg themselves, they took pictures of all of these things that they thought were cool, and then asked preschoolers about it." From those interviews and notes ranging from single words to stick-figure drawings, the class built a poem, "They Love Their Forest," which two students later read on camera. Castellini summed it up: "With their classmates, with the high schoolers, with lots and lots of people, they planted seeds and watched and waited, because that is what you do when you love a place."

The third graders didn't just write about it. Two students, Cyrus and Mason, presented the finished project at a science symposium like a couple of junior detectives, complete with a homemade erosion model. "This kid with the beard slides down the hill and makes the roots of the trees come up," Mason explained, narrating the mechanism of erosion with a Lego figure. "This is happening on Mount Peg, and then they realized that they were wrecking the plants," Cyrus added, "so they stopped and fixed it."

Ask the preschoolers who actually did the planting, and the pride comes through in their own scientific vocabulary. "Its roots make the tree stronger so they don't fall down," one explained. Another put the stakes plainly: asked what might happen if nobody had stepped in, a third grader guessed the hillside would end up looking "like a shredded baby mountain."

For Castellini and Thomason, the strongest thread running through the whole project was relationships, between the kids and the place, and across ages. "It added a sense of legitimacy to the work the preschoolers were doing," Thomason said, of the high schoolers arriving to help. "They were like, this is official business, the big kids are here." And the third graders, standing between them, learned something too. "They knew that they were leaders in the room," Castellini said, "but they also knew that we were there to hear the preschoolers' story."

For a teacher considering something similar, Castellini's advice is simple. "Just try it, just do it," she said. "Get outside, bring the kids outside, even if it's just you're going for a walk in the woods. They're going to start asking questions and making observations that you didn't even plan for."

Click to watch a video to hear Alyssa and her students share project highlights.

For more information, contact Alyssa Castellini at alyssa.castellini@mtnviews.org, or the Equitable Climate Action Project at info@uvtpc.com.