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Other Activities
Outdoor Classroom and Learning Laboratory
K-12 Class 'Space'
Little Bennett Park's rich natural environment provides many opportunities for children and students of all ages and grades to study and gain an appreciation for the outdoors. The Park's forests and fields, meadows, creeks and vernal pools can serve as outdoor class-spaces (class 'room' doesn't seem to work here) where subjects taught in science classes literally can be brought to life. For example, the Park's numerous vernal pools make it a particularly good place to examine frogs and other amphibians and how their health is indicative of the health of the entire Little Bennett eco-system. The construction of the Park's proposed Nature Center would be a big catalyst in helping to promote more of this type of learning and environmental awareness among young people.
Physical Health and Exercise
Little Bennett is also a great place for young people to get their increasingly needed physical exercise. For example, some local high school cross-country teams use the Park's trails to train. Also, the Park is planning to convert its group campground into a primitive one. This would open the Park up to an additional healthy outdoor physical activity that often appeals to young people: backpack camping. Accompanied by exploration of the Park's almost two dozen miles of trails, backpack camping in Little Bennett offers young people the potential for a fun, healthy and enriching outdoor experience.
Scouts
Little Bennett's great outdoors also appeals strongly to another youth group: Scouts. The Park provides the opportunity for leadership projects for potential Eagle Scouts in areas such as trails and helping to the map park's non-native plants and refuse dumps. Little Bennett offers older Boy and Girl Scouts opportunities to fulfill community service requirements by removing non- native plants and cleaning up old garbage dumps scattered around the Park. And many merit badge requirements need a field application that often can be fulfilled on Little Bennett parkland.
University and Post-Graduate
Little Bennett Regional Park has the potential to serve as a classroom for several local college courses ranging from geology and hydrology to insects and entire ecosystems. And at the post-graduate level, many aspects of the Park's wildlife and ecosystems are in need of continuous study. Sensitive environmental indicator species such as wood frogs and dragonflies are in need of further study and analysis. And the Friends of Little Bennett will strive for our website to be a portal to such information as it pertains to the Park.
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