It was a cool, overcast Wednesday morning in late May when 46 third-graders from Battle Creek Elementary in St. Paul trooped off the bus at the Belwin Conservancy. They were orderly but laughing, chattering and shouting at each other as kids do.
Judging from their T-shirts – “PINK,” “Grandpa’s Girl,” “New York,” “ Spider Man III” – the outdoors wasn’t first on their play list.
They didn’t know it yet but they were about to trade concrete and classrooms for a look at an open, empty rolling prairie, a hike through a pine forest and a close-up encounter with a bluebird nest. And 13 miles from their school and 15 minutes from Walmart in Woodbury, they would be quiet – almost enough to hear a pin drop and definitely enough to hear a bird chirp.
Geoff Urban, a naturalist and Saint Paul Public Schools educator with 30 years experience teaching at Belwin, led his group of eight to a bluebird box. He took the top off, and one by one, the 8-and-9-year-olds peered in. “They’re so small.” “They’re bald.” “Their mouths are wide open.”
“They are,” Urban replied. “And why is that?” The kids got it right: The babies were hungry, waiting for their mother to come with insects. For 10 minutes, the kids seemed almost transfixed, amazed to look at real life rather than an image on a screen.
“We get to learn about everything we see,” says 9-year-old Rose Thao, who likes math and science in school. On this day, she gets a first-hand look at a brown-headed cowbird in a recently built blind. And she learns a hard truth about the bird from Urban.
The kids are absolutely still as they peek through the open slots in the blind and hear the bird. Cowbirds, Urban explains, lay their eggs in nests of other birds. Their babies are bigger and push the others out of the nest. Nevertheless, Thao is enchanted at what she sees. “I do look at how beautiful it all is out here,” she says, “especially the birds.”
Eight-year-old Ronnie Wells, who thinks he might like to be President some day, says everything he saw “looked different because we actually got to see it close up.” He was especially impressed by the deer tracks he knelt over; he learned from Urban that the deer’s toes were spread when she was running and closed when she was walking.
The kids also bent over coyote scat, noticing the small clumps of fur and tiny bone fragments. With a little urging from Urban, they correctly surmised coyotes are meat eaters whose main prey are likely rabbits, with maybe even an occasional small dog or pet cat. This all fits nicely with Belwin’s goal for the third graders: observe, investigate, explore and explain.
New science standards for schools encourage students to learn these skills – observation deepens understanding of concepts introduced in the classroom. But it also establishes a connection with nature and the outdoors, which fosters the idea of caring for it.
As for Belwin, it is in the final stages of a capital campaign to raise $10.2 million (with $9.8 million already pledged) to improve access to its restored land in Washington County. Goals include building a new center designed for students with special needs, expanding hard surface trails, renovating a building to support more arts, culture and ecology programs and improving public entrances to its trails and sites.
But central to all of this, according to Development Director Angie Eckel, is giving more children access to outdoor learning at Belwin. “A deepening body of research is confirming what teachers at Belwin have witnessed for years,” she says. “Nature helps us concentrate, feel less stressed, be more self-disciplined and makes us better able to learn. The ‘greener’ the space, the more profound the impact.”
“Coming to Belwin is thrilling for all students, but especially for those with little exposure to wild spaces, including many of the children who come through our partnership with Saint Paul Public Schools,” says Eckel. The partnership began more than 50 years ago and, since that time, more than 600,000 children (including those with special needs) have participated in the Belwin Outdoor Science program.
In this partnership, Saint Paul schools provide the staff, transportation and curriculum and Belwin maintains the facilities and sets aside 225 acres of its preserve exclusively for the students. In 2024-25, nearly 10,000 students have been at Belwin. More than 1,300 attended adaptive programs for children with special needs, 78 percent were students of color and 28 percent had English as a second language.
The kids from Battle Creek Elementary mirror these demographics – and the attitude of discovery. “When I first looked at this little tree,” says third-grader Rose Thao, “I saw this white thing that looked like a giant spider web. But I got closer and could see that it wasn’t a web. I learned it was actually a tent.”
And naturalist/teacher Urban tells his students it is the home of the tent caterpillar and picks up several of the inch-long creatures for them to look at – and to watch chomping on the leaves of the small tree. The kids are impressed and move in for a closer look.
“When they’re through at Belwin,” Urban says, “some of them tell me it was the best day of their lives. And at first, some of them didn’t want to be outside. Now they can tell me they feel different, that they feel a little part of what they saw and walked past.”
The walking itself was enough to get the attention of Ronnie Wells. The third-grader was swinging his arms and taking long strides on the trail through the forest of red pines which, he learned, are the official Minnesota state tree. “It felt really good to be on the trail. I can move out,” he says, with a smile.
Some question whether it’s too much to expect that a couple of hours in a nature preserve can change the lives of children, but according to Urban, there are lots of examples of adults sharing with the staff about how this trip changed their lives. “For some, it can have an enormous impact,” he says. And in this age of smart phones, social media, cable television and video games, it definitely offers an alternative: a place to observe, to find peace, comfort and, just maybe, perspective.
They’ll be back at Belwin again as fifth graders and, thanks to the work of the Conservancy, the students will again see the unscarred face of Mother Nature: no million-dollar homes, asphalt driveways or service stations. They’ll find their St. Croix Valley backyard as it was a century ago.
Editor’s Note: Dave Nimmer was a reporter for 25 years with The Minneapolis Star and WCCO Television News. Now 85 and retired, he seeks to gaze at a prairie, walk in the woods and hear the ripple of a cold, clear creek. A supporter of Belwin, he can find it all there.
