Fall 2023 Programs with NOVA Parks and Winkler Botanical Preserve

Fall 2023 also included a series of activities at the Winkler botanical preserve. As noted in a previous post the preserve has recently become the property of Nova parks, this is a celebrated development as the property will be properly preserved for perpetuity. The preserve is making great headway in programming with local public schools on a series of environmental topics for which it is ideally suited. Several of the schools are located nearby in urban Alexandria and adjacent Fairfax County. They are in many ways fascinating bastions of internationally oriented immigrant communities. It's not uncommon to have 25 languages spoken in a single school, so it makes for a wonderful visit when these classrooms come for a variety of different activities.

Teachers and assisting parents are similarly fascinated with the preserves proximity and seeming remoteness in the city setting. The teacher’s participation in these trips is highly important not only for student involvement but also to see informal educators working with students. This is sometimes a foreign concept to a classroom teacher who is by design wed to a specific measurable curriculum in the school setting, as it should be. Informal educators often based at cultural institutions such as nature centers, public gardens, zoos, aquaria and various other museums are ultimately interpreters of collections both preserved and living. In the case of a Parkland such as the preserve the interpretation is focused on the literal environment and all its fascinating living and non-living components.

While several of these activities are game focused to mimic ecological processes, there's little doubt in my mind that the real value of the visit is simply being exposed to the preserves relatively pristine forest, lake and remarkable man-made waterfall. When meeting the kids at the local apartment complex parking lot than walking for 5 minutes into the preserve you can literally see the fascination in their eyes as they walk into this well-kept woodland seemingly hidden among the expansive urbanity. An important aspect of this type of visit is to realize that most of the nature these kids see is poorly tended and overused local parks often featuring non-native plants and even invasive species. The exposure to the preserve gives him a genuine taste of a native woodland and access to that subtle but consistent feeling of peace in a natural setting.