Idaho Falls

Outdoors by Gregg Losinski The school year may be drawing to a close but opportunities for all ages to learn abound year round, especially in a place like Idaho Falls that has so much academia to offer outside of the classroom. Alice Cooper may have known how to write a catchy tune that has become the anthem for the end of the school year, but when it came to knowing about how students learn, he failed. School is never out! Having spent the last thirty years as an informal educator for the State of Idaho, I have had the pleasure of helping a whole lot of people of all ages to learn. Hopefully I taught them some specifi c information, but more importantly, I hope I helped them learn how to teach themselves. Some of my teaching has occurred in a traditional classroom setting, but most of it by using the world around us as a classroom. Even the dozens of safety talks I have given in drab government conference rooms for site workers were all about the outdoors and what could be experienced and learned there. There is always a time and place for reading, formulas, and calculations, but to truly understand how it all fi ts together it helps to get outside and see how things function in the real world both naturally and under the infl uence of man. Sometimes the best ways for adults to learn is for them to observe how children's play turns into learning. Very young chil- dren are not encumbered with the true knowledge of how things work. They can enjoy the moment for what it is and expe- rience things without preconceived out- comes. We adults need to make sure that kids have a chance to explore the natural world before they get sucked into the digi- tal charade that has taken over so much of our lives. We owe it to our kids to kick them outside and make them experience the world powered by the original solar energy system. The one with plants and trees, not wires and panels. This summer you owe it to yourself and your children if you have any, to go out to Sandy Downs and roll down the dunes. Take the time to process that the sand there started out long ago as huge rocks and was ground down and then carried there by the wind from hundreds of miles away. Such is the true power of wind energy that we are just taking baby steps to learn how to har- ness it with our massive wind towers. On a hot summer day there is no bet- ter place to both cool off and learn than at Pedersen Sportsmen's Park located down- town by the Broadway Bridge. In the 1930's, Peder Pedersen a local outdoors enthusiast created what he called an outdoor museum. He built concrete raceways to raise trout, planted native plants and had ponds with all types of local and exotic birds. The trout are long gone, and the plants are now a mix of native and exotic, but it is still an incred- ible place to experience and learn. Sit and contrast the mighty Snake that fl ows by with the diverted fl ows running across the lava rocks. Check out the huge holes created by grinder stones over the millennium and compare with how the plants with their tiny roots are also assaulting the solid basalt and ever so slowly creating soil. School may be out for the summer, but unlike the song, school goes on forever if you want it to! is where you look for it IF 78  IDAHO FALLS MAGAZINE  MAY/JUNE 2016 LEARNING

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