Surge Narrows school came out June 18-22 to have a retreat in a beautiful location, after finishing their schoolwork for the year. The children, parents and teacher had the chance to find out about what running a field station looks like and to explore different trails and beaches on the island as well as participate in games led by Cedar coast summer student, Taylor.
Surge Narrows had a busy week ahead of them, full of plenty of activities led by their teacher and Taylor.
After settling into the inn the night before, the group awoke to an overcast, fairly warm day. To kick start the week of learning, Taylor led an activity to wake up the senses of the children. Then, the children played the rainbow chip game, where they went and found plants and natural objects that matched closely to the colour of a paint chip and subsequently wrote a haiku about the colour. These activities got the children ready to learn about the local environment and to critically look at plants, animals and the environment that they were spending time in.
After waking up everyone’s senses, the group hiked to Keltsmaht beach to explore tide pools, run over clam gardens and splash through ocean waves.
Most of the days had some trust and team building games put on by Taylor, either after breakfast or after dinner. The kids played perfect square where they worked together to form a square with a rope that they were all holding on to.
The children also navigated a low ropes obstacle course with their eyes closed, by relying on and learning to trust a buddy who helped guide them verbally through the course. We also played willow in the wind where a student would spin around and be caught by students huddled around them in a tight circle.
The kids practiced clear communication, patience, trust and creativity in these activities.
One evening the students played a game where they sat back to back in pairs. One held a drawing and verbally described how to draw it to the other student who had a pencil and paper. The activity kept the children entertained for hours and some rounds ended in raucous laughter when someone’s drawing turned out completely different than the template.
The group also had the chance to hike to the other side of the island from the field station, to Ahous Bay. There the parents and kids collected shells, egg sacs and other sea creature bits that had washed up on shore. When the group returned to the station, they identified and labelled the different species that the shells and egg casings belonged to.
The students played a scavenger hunt one evening where they raced around to find local plants and items from the beach, in an attempt to beat the other team. There was some confusion about who was on which team but the activity was deemed a success. The children got some good exercise, and practiced identifying and finding some of the local plants and beach items.
One overcast day, the older kids set out with one of the moms and Taylor to paddle past Keltsmaht by kayak over to Mud Bay. At Mud bay, there was an interesting spectacle to be witnessed. A pair of bald eagles were standing on the mudflats quite close to where the group paddled past. The eagles took off and soared over to the trees but later returned to the mudflats. Some ospreys were fishing just after. One caught a fish right in front of the group, in full view for everyone to see. To make the trip even more exciting, many small fish zipped underneath the kayaks in shallow water in between the eelgrass as the group was paddling by. The weather held and it only started lightly spitting on the return trip back to the inn.
The group hiked to Medallion beach on one of the overcast days The trek was really awe-inspiring. The trail passes by a beautiful, massively tall Sitka spruce tree which recently lost a large branch. This provided a make shift playground to climb on and a lookout point. At the beach the weather did nothing to perturb the children from jumping in and snorkeling in tide pools to look for and catch fish as well as splashing in the waves. A raven was harassing black oyster catchers and may have gotten into their nest at the far end of the beach.
Later on at Medallion beach, sandcastle empires could be seen being built by a few of the boys. And later, the empires lay in ruins from “erosion,” “acid rain” and other “natural events.”
The group from Surge Narrows school was a lot of fun to have around and the cedar coast staff thank them for using our station as their retreat location. We hope that the children learned a lot from their experience on Vargas island and that they enjoyed it as much as the staff. We look forward to the next group that will be coming to the station, with the broad reach marine mammal studies expedition.
Written By: Taylor Restall, 2018 Summer Student
