Adams students head to the great outdoors

Adams Elementary third and fourth graders are having FUN at school – that’s Finding Urban Nature – a program sponsored by the Seattle Audubon Society.

A group of students look at an orb web

Over the course of eight weeks, four in the fall and four in the spring, the students will learn to look for hidden habitats right in their school yard. We caught up with the students during the “web it” lesson that was all about spiders. The kids got a brief lesson indoors and then hit the schoolyard in search of spiders. “I think that’s the most valuable environmental education,” volunteer Dennis Burgart says.”To do the learning right where they live.”

A volunteer sprays a web to make it more visible for the students.

The hands-on lessons are working. The students we spoke with came away with new knowledge about spiders. “I actually did not know that spiders were arachnids,” one student tells us. “I thought they were insects.”

A volunteer searches for a bug to bait the web

Holiday Dickens and her dad, Chris, both say that today’s lesson will carry over to other parts of their lives. “Today I learned that spiders are really neat creatures and I think I’m going to study them,” Holiday says. Her dad agrees. “We go to Discovery Park a lot so we’ll be putting to use some of these techniques that we’re learning here,” he says.

After their adventures, the students and volunteers came in to document their findings.

Many of the students found orb webs, which are your traditional spider web, funnel webs and cob webs. They baited spiders and watched them work. The kids loved it. “Just looking at the spider do all that cool stuff,” Ava Ault says, “I’ve never seen a spider do that before.”

With the help of 100 volunteers, the FUN program is able to serve more than 800 students each year in Seattle. According to Janelle Shafer with the Audubon Society, students who participate in this program show a 13-percent increase in environmental science knowledge.