HIGH SCHOOL FIELD LEARNING EXPERIENCE
All school programs are offered at no cost. These free programs are designed to support Michigan academic standards.
High 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.
Field Research Fellows
Field Research Fellows treats the school year as a research season. Students assess ecological condition at a preserve in the fall, take on the physics and ecology of snowpack in winter, and in the spring write about the place they have spent a year measuring, applying the same rigor first to instruments and then to language. High schoolers are ready for work that hasn’t been staged for them, and little here has been. Students return with field methods, a season of their own data, and practice explaining it to a reader who wasn’t there.
Fall: Ecological Conditions Science
Winter: Winter Snow Science
Spring: Nature Writing
Standards:
HS-LS2-6 Evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem.
WHST.9-10.2 Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events, scientific procedures/experiments, or technical processes.
Build Your Own Sequence
Choose one or as many of the programs below to arrange field learning experiences to support your teaching this year.
By 1911, habitat destruction led to the American marten being extirpated from the lower peninsula of Michigan. In this field learning experience students use the same tools as LTC ecologists to measure if the forest could provide habitat for this house-cat-sized member of the weasel family today after it was reintroduced in the 1980’s. Measuring canopy cover, tree density, and dead wood, students build a case for if the features of the forest we read as messy are exactly what a marten needs.
HS-LS2-6 Evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem.
This program is intended to expose students to the art of photography while providing them with an outdoor experience that will inspire an appreciation and awareness of the natural world. Photography is an excellent tool for expressing creativity, as well as getting outdoors.
ART-VA-II-HS-2 Create artwork using materials and techniques with skill so that personal intentions are carried out.
Vernal pools fill in the spring, hold water for a few months, and are gone by late summer. Because they dry, they hold no fish, and because they hold no fish, they are the only place a handful of species can breed successfully. Students survey a pool and its residents, recording what they find and what stage of development it has reached, then take on the question the habitat poses: how a place defined by its own disappearance came to support species that can survive nowhere else. Because vernal pools occur at only a few of our preserves and hold water for a short window each spring, this program is limited in both location and timing. Contact us early to schedule.
HS-LS2-6 Evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem.
Snow is not one substance but a layered record of the winter that built it. Traveling by snowshoe, students dig a snow pit to the ground and read the wall it exposes, identifying the individual storms, thaws, and cold snaps preserved in each layer. Measuring temperature at intervals through the pack and comparing the hardness and grain shape of each layer, students work out what happens to snow after it lands: how it settles and compacts under its own weight, and how the temperature gradient between warm ground and cold air rebuilds the crystals into something entirely different from what fell.
HS-ESS2-5 Plan and conduct an investigation of the properties of water and its effects on Earth materials and surface processes.