Arbor Day Cleveland-2018 with Children of Terra

Arbor Day is a day to not only celebrate and plant trees, but to learn about and connect to nature! Camp Forbes has been helping children from the Cleveland area connect with nature for decades! The work they do, as well as our passion for educating children through exploration, became the inspiration for this Arbor Day program. Through hands on learning and discovery, we aim to inspire a dedication to nature and science while also tackling some environmental issues. 

 

We will be going on a light nature walk, led by an actual arborist and assisted by one of our local plant experts, learning about the trees of Ohio along the way. Each child will receive Ohio Tree ID cards to assist their learning. Upon returning from the walk, we will have a few interactive experiments and touch exhibits to learn about trees how drink, breathe, and make food, as well as their anatomy. After having so much fun exploring and learning, we will need to refuel! During the bagged-lunch break, kids will have the chance to pick our arborist's brain on trees, what being an arborist is like, and about the importance of education. After lunch, we'll head back outside to learn how to measure the age of a tree, and what some of the changes in tree growth mean before wrapping up the arbor day celebration. 

  

We believe that a lot of childhood learning and inspiration take place outside of school and extracurricular programs. With that in mind, each child will be going home with a junior arborist kit that includes some of the materials they receive during the program, plus some new ones to get inspired by and learn with at home. Don't forget, it is an Arbor Day celebration! What better way to inspire potential future arborists than to give them their very own tree to plant and watch grow? Each child will receive a tree seedling of an Ohio species to take home and plant somewhere special.  

1. -Spread the word! 
     Our team has built an incredible network over years of hard work and dedication to our causes like ours. We will get word out about this program through our personal and social networks, business networks, social media and related networks, and good some good ol' fashion grassroots informational campaigning. 

1. -Garner support 
      While spreading the word about this program, we will also be helping to build support for it from the local communities. In fact, we are already working on this step! 

1. -Register participants 
      As it stands, the materials and personnel for this program are set to accommodate 30-35 children. In order to ensure that we don't become over encumbered with             participants and not have enough materials to go around, we will open registration for this program around a month before Arbor Day. 

1. -Acquire supplies and materials 
      Approximately three weeks before the program, we will begin ordering and picking up the materials needed for this program, so as to ensure enough of a time buffer         should something not go as planned. 

1. -Practice makes perfect! 
      The volunteers running and assisting in this Arbor Day celebration will do a "rehearsal" of sorts, so as to ensure that everyone knows the plan, and can deliver the best     possible experience for the children. 

1. -Execution is key 
      On the day of the program, we will have all displays, experiments, kits, and exploration ready to go long before participants arrive. Thanks to thorough planning and an     incredible team, we will deliver an exceptional educational experience for the children. 

1. -Follow up and improvement 
      After the event, we hope to stay in contact with all of the children and their families. Through follow up contact and conversation the families, we will identify what (if          anything) could have made the program better for the children participating in it, and continue inspiring a passion for nature and science. 

As we said,  Arbor Day is a day to not only celebrate and plant trees, but to learn about and connect to nature! Access to natural settings and environmental education can be rather limited throughout the Cleveland area. With continued development of land and the expansion of suburban sprawl outside of the city, this access continues to become even more limited. We recognize how important it is for children to develop not only a connection to nature, but a understanding of the sciences of the natural world. Time with nature can provide a wide range of amazing benefits for a child's mental health and aid in the development of crucial social skills. A better understanding of the natural world and the scientific studies applied to it can help to build a strong base on which children can create a successful future for themselves, both academically and beyond. 

 

While our main focus of this program is the children, we are also taking action against climate change. Cleveland is a city of creation, innovation, and development. Of course, with so much going on, we produce quite of bit of CO2 as a result. In fact, we produced an average of about 23 tons of CO2e per person in 2005. While that number has fluctuated in the time since then, northeast Ohioans are still putting out higher carbon emissions than the national average. Trees act as a natural carbon sink, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and using it in the process of photosynthesis. While it would take an outrageous number of trees to offset the CO2 produced here, all good things must start somewhere. With each tree a child takes home to plant in their community, they are helping to offset their carbon footprint and inspire change within their own neighborhoods. Each tree planted represents a step towards better health, better environments, a better understanding of nature, and a sustainable future for the children involved and their communities.