Warming Up for Winter Outdoor Education

Explorer West Middle School staff and students are preparing for the Winter Outdoor Education (OE) program which includes several Friday trips to The Summit/Snoqualmie Pass recreational areas in January and February. With the leadership of a new OE faculty member, Philip Giammarino, the Winter OE curriculum is evolving to stay closer to the school’s mission and program goals, which includes teaching progressive independence and making safe outdoor adventure choices. With the new school facility, one of the portables is being used as a storage and prep space for the wide array of school-owned gear.

More specifically, the winter program includes:

• 6^th grade students build their own snowshoes out of sustainable willow and other materials with the guidance of experts from Cascade Designs. They transverse the snow by hiking in their new shoes to areas where they can begin to learn snow shelter and survival skills.
• 7^th grade students learn cross-country skiing and intermediate snow safety lessons.
• 8th grade students use rented snowshoes to travel deeper into the snow wilderness. They enhance their snow studies/analysis with more advanced snow shelter building and avalanche safety training.

Phil has been on two Explorer West Outdoor Education trips previously and is very excited to work with the students again to build on their energy and skills. To learn more about Phil’s expertise in this arena, please visit the Explorer West faculty page at: http://www.explorerwest.org/faculty.asp.

Teaching the Teacher About Green Learning

Green Teacher magazine’s Fall 2010 edition includes an article on “Sustainable Design for a Bountiful Future” by Ben Wheeler, Explorer West’s Global Studies and History Teacher. In this article, he provides a collection of lessons for teachers interested in sustainability and sustainable design. Readers of this publication can use Ben’s strategies and teaching exercises to engage teenagers in thinking about sustainability and how we can get there as a society.

To learn more about Ben, visit the Explorer West faculty page at: http://www.explorerwest.org/faculty.asp. For more information about Green Teacher, visit: www.greenteacher.com.

6th Graders Visit Cascade Designs

Hammers are banging and brightly colored earplugs are visible in the 6th graders' ears. It's snowshoe building season at Explorer West. The first part of the process models assembly line strategies: measuring webbing, counting out D-rings and punching holes in bindings. It's a team effort, including very generous donations of supplies from local outdoor manufacturer, Cascade Designs.

To learn more about the assembly process, students travelled to SoDo for a tour of Cascade Designs this afternoon. We were greeted by EW parent and Purchasing Supply Chain Manager, Dan Means, and Chris Parkhurst the Division Manager for Winter Products who introduced the students to the company and the facility. Cascade Designs is a local company who designs and manufactures their products on-site at their 1st Ave. S. facility. Students saw the assembly of the MSR Whisperlite stoves that EW uses on backpacking trips. Our tour guide, Manufacturing Engineer Nate Pattison, walked us through the snowshoe assembly and described the new binding system being used on the new models.They make approximately 300 pairs of snowshoes each day at the factory, that was an eye-opener given our much slower rate at EW. A highlight of the snowshoe tour was the machine that tests a snowshoe by repeatedly stressing it.

We also got to tour the new design office and show off a sample of our original design. Finally, we toured the thermarest portion of the plant. Foam pads and air mattresses were both in production as we walked through. To make the foam pads lighter, holes are punched in the body and then sent into HUGE storage bags. These extrusions are then used for fill in Thermarest pillows. Nothing is wasted.

Now that we've seen one company's process, we have something to compare our own to. Although we are working with irregular pieces like willow branches, there are certainly many ways we can apply what we learned at Cascade Designs to the classroom. Check back later for more updates on our building process.