07 Feb Visiting an Elementary School

I love working with the local community and learning more about them. Luckily this job focuses a lot on building and maintaining those relationships established between USFWS and the communities that the wildlife refuges are in.

The Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex covers four different counties! This means we have a lot of people we would like to reach and I have seen efforts made towards that.

Recently I went to a local elementary school to represent USFWS and the complex for a STEAM Night. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. The goal of this event was to provide activities that spark students’ interests and curiosity in these fields. It was also very cool because this elementary school is a bilingual school (English/Spanish) so I was able to talk to some kiddos in Spanish as well. I also enjoyed seeing so much diversity not only in the students but in the facility. It was a very welcoming environment and it was great to be a part of that.

My station consisted of general information about the refuges and a habitat game. The habitat game consisted of labeled pictures of differently habitats and different labeled animal cutouts which the kids then had to match the animals to the correct habitat. The labels were in both English and Spanish. It was a fun experience seeing how much they knew and also teaching them along the way. They also seemed to overall really like the activity.

I enjoy these types of events where we interact with the community and overall gain their interest in this field.

I hope to do more of these events throughout my internship here 🙂