SEAD

A few times each season, we have a SEAD day here at Pok-O. SEAD stands for "Staff Enrichment and Development." These days are days for us to expand our own knowledge about topics we teach about here at Pok-O, both to provide professional development for staff members and to further improve our program.

On Monday we had a SEAD day in Montreal. Our primary destination was the Biosphere, Montreal's Environment Museum. Most of the current exhibits focus on the St. Laurence River Watershed, which includes Long Pond! Most of what we teach about watersheds in our Pond Ecology class focuses on the water that is going into Long Pond...so it was really interesting to learn more about where our water is going when it leaves Long Pond.

We also were fascinated by the structure of the Biosphere. The museum is housed in a giant geodesic sphere. The sphere was originally built as the U.S. Pavillion at the 1967 World's Fair. After the Fair, it remained a popular tourist destination, until a fire destroyed that outer covering in 1976, leaving only the frame of the sphere behind. Eventually a new building was built inside the sphere to house the Environment Museum, though the outer covering was never replaced.

The sphere was designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, a visionary architect, engineer and inventor. Fuller was devoted to sustainable design, and spent his life designing buildings, cars, and other technology that would help reduce the number of resources used by people in their everyday lives. Fuller was well ahead of his time on the issue of environmental sustainability...he was thinking about these issues as early as the 1920s!

After we left the museum, we took some time to walk around the old city in Montreal. Perhaps the highlight of this point in the day was when we passed a restaurant that had decorated for Halloween with gibbets! Brian was very excited to see them. (Read the post about Haunted Homestead to find out why...)

Haunted Homestead

Last weekend was "Haunted Homestead", the Halloween program that the Outdoor Education runs jointly with the 1812 Homestead Farm and Museum. Despite the rainy weather, we had a great turn out, and we hope that all of our visitors had fun!

One of the main components of the program is the hay maze that we set up in the main barn at the Homestead. It's quite an endeavor to build---approximately 400 bales of hay, arranged into a maze that traverses 2 stories of the barn, all structurally reinforced with re-bar and braced with cross beams across the top...and then decorated with scary scenes at every turn! In the end we had a maze that, according to reviews, was pretty terrifying.

We also had a "haunted hayride" through the woods of the homestead. Along the trail riders encountered (or were attacked by) a homicidal clown, and doctor who killed his patients, a chainsaw serial killer, a living scarecrow, Sasquatch, and a few other scary folks as well. We were especially pleased to have the Drama Club from the Willsboro Central School working with us on the hayride this year---they set up a cannibal scene that, based on the screams that always came when the wagon went past their station, was one of the highlights of the hayride.

In addition to the volunteers from the Drama Club, we were also happy to have the freshman class from Willsboro Central School join us to run the concession stand. Proceeds from concession sales went to the class as part of their fundraising efforts for class trips.

All in all, it was a great event. Thanks to everyone who came, and all of our volunteers!

(If you were wondering what that picture at the top of the post was...it was a gibbet that we constructed to hang along the hayride trail. Gibbets were iron cages that were used to display the bodies of executed criminals. The gibbets were commonly hung along highways and waterways as a deterrent to other would-be criminals. Brian had the idea to make a gibbet for Haunted Homestead last year, but we weren't able to pull it together in time, so he had hung onto the idea for this year. He was very proud of the end result.)

Various Programs

There have been a lot of things going on here at Pok-O recently...it's hard to keep up with it all on the blog! Here are photos from two different programs that we had last week...

On Friday, most of the staff traveled down to Corinth, NY to run a team-building program for some of their middle schoolers. It was a beautiful day there--and somewhat warmer than it had been in Willsboro--so the staff certainly enjoyed being out on the football field at the middle school. We took a variety of team-building activities with us, some of which are shown in the next three photos.

Then on Saturday we hosted a Wildlife Tracking Hike for the local community. The hike was led by John Davis and Chris Maron of the Champlain Area Trail Society. We didn't see many animal tracks, but we saw some signs of wildlife, including the woodpecker holes pictured below. We also simply enjoyed the beautiful day and a the view from the top of the mountain.

This week we're setting up for "Haunted Homestead", the Halloween program that the Outdoor Ed Center and 1812 Homestead run jointly. The haymaze is well underway, and plans are in the making for one of our best haunted hayrides ever! We hope we'll see some of you there...

Goodbye Adam!

As Stites mentioned in his post yesterday, today was Adam's last day working at Pok-O this fall.

Here's a classic photo of Adam that Liz took today: Adam just after throwing a frisbee. Among Adam's many contributions to Pok-O, he instituted the tradition of the staff playing frisbee while the kids load onto the buses before leaving.

We will certainly miss him, and hope he'll be back again to visit!

MId-Season Report

We have turned the corner on our fall season. During the month of September, we averaged around 80 kids at PMOEC each day, but that number has been cut in half for the months of October and November. This is giving us a little more time to focus on our After-School Programs with different local schools, our curriculum and program development and, of course, our Community Events- Haunted Homestead, Underground Railroad and plenty of others. Also, we are about to say goodbye to our seasonal instructor, Adam Reed, who will be leaving at the end of this week. I had heard wonderful things about Adam from last year's staff and from all of the Pok-O-MacCready Camp employees, but unless I had seen his expertise with our students, I would not have believed it. Adam has the patience of a monk and the energy of a bumblebee. Combine those with his intensely optimistic disposition, and you've still only scratched the surface of one of the more genuine individuals I have had the chance to meet. Adam will be missed as the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, but he will be welcomed back with open arms if he chooses to return in the spring. That's all for now from the Director's desk.

Astronomy and Pizza!

On Saturday night we hosted an "Astronomy and Pizza" event for families in the local community. Despite the rainy weather, we had a great turnout, and the event went really well.

We started the evening by having everyone make their own pizzas. We had lots of toppings to pick from, and I don't think that we had any two pizzas topped the same way!

While the pizzas were cooking, we headed outside to talk about our solar system. We were making a scale model of the solar system, starting with an 8-inch diameter plastic pumpkin as the sun. We talked about how big the planets would be in relation to that size sun (the Earth would be about the size of a peppercorn), then spaced out lanterns to show how far each of the planets would be for the sun. This was quite a hike, since each step represented 3,600,000 miles. (We were really tired by the end of it.) The vast distances in space can be somewhat hard to comprehend, but this activity helps you see it a little bit better. To help give you some perspective: using this scale model, if we were going to place the next closest star to us (Proxima Centauri) in the model, we've have to travel all the way to somewhere south of Philadelphia.

After our trek across the solar system, we headed inside for dinner. The pizza was great! I think that most of the people at the event could get a second job as a pizza chef if they wanted to.

Since it was raining, we weren't able to go outside to look at stars, so we set up our constellation projector on the ceiling of the dining room and did a little indoor star gazing. Liz told the stories that various cultures have made up for the constellations over the ages, helping us understand how people in the past made sense of what they saw in the sky before they had the technology to help them learn about it scientifically.

There are still quite a few community events to go on the schedule this fall, so we hope to see you there. Some of the ones that I, in particular, am looking forward to are the Wildlife Tracking Hike on October 17th and our Underground Railroad simulation on November 6th. And our Haunted Homestead program (October 23 and 24) at the 1812 Homestead is always a lot of fun! You can find more information on these events, plus all the other great ones we have planned, here.

We hope to see you at an event soon!

Dreary Fall

It has seemed like there have been more rainy days than nice ones in the past few weeks, making this a pretty dreary fall. It's hard to truly appreciate the colors in the trees when they're lit by gray light rather than sunshine.

But even in gloomy weather, it's worth the trip out to see what's going on in the woods. If nothing else, the rain has at least resulted in an amazing array of fungus, as seen in the following photos.

(Thanks to my father for letting me use the photos that he took while he and my mom were up visiting me last week!)