MIDDLE SCHOOL FIELD LEARNING EXPERIENCE
All school programs are offered at no cost. These free programs are designed to support Michigan academic standards.
Middle School Field Learning Sequence
What is it?
New to our program offerings for the 2026–2027 school year are School Field Learning Sequences. Each sequence is three visits across fall, winter, and spring, designed as a single experience rather than three separate field trips. Winter programs are built to be flexible, taking place in the field on snowshoes or in the classroom, to allow for uncertain weather or for groups without winter gear. By the third visit students stop managing the newness and start paying attention to their surroundings. They recognize what they found in the fall and connect it to what is in front of them now.
Students in a program sequence design a wood cookie name tag on the first visit. We hold them between visits and hand them back each time the group returns, and students keep theirs at the end of the spring program.
Booking a sequence means one conversation and a set of dates held for your year.
The Field Studies
Middle schoolers are ready to hold a whole system in mind at once, to trace how a change in one part of northern Michigan turns up somewhere else. The Field Studies builds that view across the year. Students start close in, collecting data at a Great Lakes shoreline or in a stream near their school, then investigate how life persists through a northern winter, then widen out to the Great Lakes basin those local sites drain into. Each visit connects back to the one before it. Students return able to collect real data and to read their own community as part of something much larger.
Fall: Beach Exploration or Stream Detectives (depends on the local preserve)
Winter: Winter Biodiversity and Survival
Spring: Greatness of the Great Lakes
Standard: MS-LS2-4 Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
Build Your Own Sequence
Choose one or as many of the programs below to arrange field learning experiences to support your teaching this year.
Beaches are collectors. Students search the shoreline for whatever the lake has delivered, then choose one object and work out its story from the evidence in front of them: what it is, where it came from, and what has happened to it since. The group turns finally to the sand itself, the end product of every erosive force acting on rock, and traces it back through the glaciers that carried it here to stone older than almost anything on earth. Students close by finding a spot alone to put down what the place makes them feel, in words or in drawing.
MS-ESS2-2 Construct an explanation based on evidence for how geoscience processes have changed Earth’s surface at varying time and spatial scales.
In Stream Detectives, students become investigators of moving water. They track floating objects to see how currents behave, compare areas of fast and slow flow, and notice how different sizes of rocks and sediments reveal the stream’s power. By piecing together these clues, students learn how streams carve the landscape over time and make predictions about how the waterway might change in the future.
MS-ESS2-2 Construct an explanation based on evidence for how geoscience processes have changed Earth’s surface at varying time and spatial scales.
The Great Lakes hold a fifth of the world’s surface freshwater, and nearly everything that falls on northern Michigan drains toward them. Students begin by locating themselves inside that system, working out where the water around them goes and what it carries along the way. From there they take on the living side of the lakes, following how energy moves between species and what happens when something arrives that does not belong. The program closes with quiet time to reflect on what the lakes mean to them.
MS-LS2-3 Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.
A winter forest looks empty. The snow says otherwise. Traveling by snowshoe, students survey a section of preserve and record every track, trail, and sign they encounter, building a picture of which animals are using this place and how heavily. Working from that evidence, students take on questions a single observation cannot answer: how much life is here, what the presence or absence of a species suggests about conditions at this site, and what would happen to the rest if one part of the system changed.
MS-LS2-4 Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.