Teacher uses nature's classroom

At 9 a.m. Thursday morning, Alberton teacher Maureen Froehlich gave a new, perhaps more effective, meaning to the phrase, “no child left behind.”

As her fourth and fifth grade science class trudged up a frost-bitten hill behind the school to the Joe Hanson Nature Trail, three of her students lagged behind the others.

Without becoming irritated or distracted, Froehlich took the students aside and showed them an example of knapweed, a noxious weed that exists in the mountains of Montana, and explained to the students why the weed does not belong there. The weed was brought over from Europe and Asia and has no natural predators in Montana. Since there are no animals to eat it, the plant often takes over areas, preventing other natural plants from surviving.

They each grabbed a fistful of weed and yanked it out of the ground before proceeding on their hike.

“There’s a lot of this stuff just in your own backyard,” Froehlich said as she yanked out a particularly ornery looking knapweed.

It’s no wonder Froehlich recently received an award for her natural sciences instruction.

“It’s all about the kids,” Froehlich said at a surprise award ceremony in her honor held in the Alberton Gymnasium Tuesday morning.

Arnie Olson, the executive director of the Montana Natural History Center, presented the award to Froehlich along with Jessie Sherburne, a teacher with the MNHC who has been working with Froehlich’s class.

“It’s you guys that got the award,” Froehlich said to the crowd of students. “It’s the fifth, sixth and seventh graders that take this and run.”

Froehlich said that she loves her job because she is teaching her students important information.

“This is important for them to learn because they’re citizens and participants in the natural world,” Froehlich said after the ceremony. “Understanding how nature works is essential to being a good caretaker.”

Rebecca Pluth, a member of Froehlich’s fourth grade science class, said that she really enjoys the lessons in natural history she gets from Froehlich.

“I like learning about nature and being outside,” Pluth said.

Her classmates agreed.

Despite the 45 degree temperatures and 80 percent cloud cover — facts gleaned from the weather measurements taken by the class when they arrived at the summit of their hike Thursday — the students were engaged and excited about what they were learning.

Froehlich, along with Sherburne and two other volunteers from the MNHC, spent almost the entire day with the class, crawling through the bushes and trails, looking for hands-on examples of how nature works.

The students all came to class bundled up Thursday, expecting to spend the entire day in the cold outdoors.

At Tuesday’s awards ceremony Froehlich said that the class would be outside no matter what the weather threw at them, and she had warned them to dress appropriately.

The cold hardly had any bearing on the students’ mood, because after their weather measurements were taken they were broken up into different groups to study different parts of the trail.

One group took off on a nature hike while another group huddles around a field with their jewelers’ loops, a small but effective magnifying glass on a string around their necks that allows them to look more closely at the world around them.

Froehlich stayed with a group of students who has a particularly unique task to complete.

Each student in her and Rose Graves’ group was assigned a plant or object to read about and observe alone for a few minutes. They were told to pick out what they felt are the three most important facts about their topic and take a quick sketch of their topic.

Then the entire class gathered together and each student taught the others what they had just learned.

Students taught each other how animals can find shelter in small cavities left by fallen trees, and how red squirrels store food in caches that can become as big as a car. They also examined conifer trees and grass to see what they could learn.

At the end of their lesson, the students shifted to other groups to learn something new. Froehlich said that the field trips are a great hands-on way for the kids to learn about the world around them.

“These kids are very, very lucky to have this opportunity,” Froehlich said.