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April 12, 2006
Teaching kids about geocaching at my library
When I received the current issue of Off The Shelf newsletter (the weekly newsletter for my library, published on a blog, with an RSS feed, an email counterpart, and an edited version in the local paper) last Thursday, it was noted that Rachel Baumgartner, one of our Swiss Army knife librarians (she works reference, children's, *and* local history, and she does a wicked good job at them all) would be leading a nature walk for kids and parents in the Reading forest. On top of being a very diverse librarian, she's quite the green thumb extraordinaire (you should see her yard and plants, they're beautiful!), so she really knows her nature.
My husband and I are big on getting out into nature: hiking, walking, camping, canoeing, all that. So I emailed Rachel to see if she'd be scheduling a nature walk for grown ups, since we'd like that a lot, but we're not much for kids.
Flash forward to Sunday, when my husband and I are breaking in our brand new waffle iron (our first official wedding gift). I get a call from Rachel saying that she and her husband are going on a nature walk that very afternoon, and would we like to come. So post-waffleage, my husband and I got ourselves together for an outdoor jaunt. Camera, check. Digital binoculars, check. Water and snacks, check. Geocaching bag, check.
Geocaching bag?
Yup. My husband and I are of the breed of nature and tech geeks that like to wander around holding a GPS on a scavenger hunt for a little container filled with suprises and a log book, making every effort to avoid muggles finding us out. We spent our entire minimoon on a geocaching adventure, we like it so much. It's a fun way to get out into nature, or even just explore a city, since you can find caches in just about any setting. Since we were going out into nature, I checked the Geocaching.com site for a cache that might be near where we might be, stuffed the coordinates into the backpack filled with our geocaching supplies (GPS, trinkets for cache swap, Cache In Trash Out kit, headlamp, extra pencils and paper, etc., all in a ziplock bag), and off we went.
We figured that if the cache was near our walk, we'd bump into it, but if not, we'd hit it after the walk on our own. Turns out our walking companions were intrigued (I'd talked about geocaching at work before), and since the cache wasn't on our path, we hopped in the car and headed in the direction of the coordinates in the GPS (by now, Rachel's husband also had his GPS out, and we were all tracking it). Luckily enough, Rachel found the cache (which doesn't always happen), did our swap, took some photos, and headed on out.
As the fun was being had, the ideas were flying. I'd always thought that there should be a virtual cache at the library, just because that would be cool (I'll be working on that soon). Rachel was thinking even bigger to the children's summer reading program, where the theme is games.
So we are now looking at creating and placing 3 library-sponsored, family-friendly caches in Reading, MA. We'll be looking for little stuffed animals to represent Reado, our kids summer program mascot, and Chumley, the kids room gerbil who will be the subject of a kidnapping-whodunnit for the kids this summer, to place in the caches, and probably adding some travel bugs, too. Perhaps we'll be able to swing buying 3 GPS units for the library to check out to patrons, if we can get them at a cheap enough price used. Rachel asked me if I'd do a program/presentation about geocaching for kids grade 3-5 and parents, and show off my geocaching bag ;D. Such a super keen thing. I even volunteered to do a field trip to one of our caches. In future, we could even do workshops on creating caches with kids.
And this is how the library newsletter and an afternoon in the woods created a wonderfully interactive and fun program for the community and the staff at my library. Thought I'd share.
April 12, 2006 2:38 PM