North Park Village Nature Center

Just where you've always wanted to go! A former tuberculosis sanitarium!

No, really, you do want to go. There's a nature center with a pretty decent chunk of land that is filled with trails (near Pulaski and Bryn Mawr). The first part of it you'll find is the nature center itself. The first room you walk into has a table filled with bones, horns and other animal stuff including a turtle shell. The best part is that kids can play with all of these things. There are also a couple of dioramas showing off local insect life, though only the charismatic kind, and some of the bird nests you might find. There's also a room for small kids and a meeting room for all of the programs they put on.

But really, you're here for the trails. Despite being in the city and despite limited land, there are three pretty distinct ecological communities. There is a savanna/forest, prairie and a wetland. There are signs explaining things, which are worse for the wear, along the trails, which are well marked. You might want to do a little wikipedia work in advance (which is where the links above go) to get around this problem.

There are quite a few different kinds of birds here, so you may want to bring a pair of binoculars. Or just borrow theirs.

How this pertains to elementary grade students

Students this age can learn how different plants and animals live in different places. Different plants can grow in places where the ground is wet than in places where the ground is dry. Different animals, birds in the case of this place, have different ways of making a living. These differences lead to plants and animals with the same way of making a living to live in similar sorts of places. That is to say: if you see cattails, you should be on the look out for red wing blackbirds too. 

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

A trip here is really something different and maybe technically not in the city. The USDA is in the middle of restoring a large portion of tallgrass prairie where the Joliet Arsenal used to be. Better yet, it's in the middle of other areas reserved for wildlife, so it's a large contiguous stretch of more-or-less wild country. Apparently they're going to have a herd of bison there in the near future, but I digress.

There is a small visitor center on Rt. 53, which is where I took the picture above. The staff was helpful, so helpful that you might get the feeling that the number of visitors is low. The history of the area was on display, particularly how the settlers turned the prairie into farms and arsenal, but you're here for the prairie. Maps and the like are at the visitor center. If you've not been here or don't live near here, you probably ought to go to the visitor center first.

We hiked on a trail that was both in the sun and in the shade, so be prepared for both, but mostly sun. There aren't many trees in the fully restored sections of prairie. There were a lot of grasshoppers, and by the creek we saw a lot of frogs. Like pestilential levels of frogs.

How this pertains to elementary grade students
This trip is both a science and a social studies sort of thing. For the science, you can talk about the grassland biome (or whatever they're calling it these days). I pointed out how the grasshoppers were in the sun but the frogs were near the water. Different living things need different conditions.

For the history, I told my daughter that this is what much of Illinois looked like before the settlers came west. Since there is so little prairie, and what of it there is is in small clumps, the bigger portions are something to see. I cannot imagine how the first settlers dealt with it. Prairie is a very dense. (Fire does come to mind though.)

Fort Dearborn

We went down to where Fort Dearborn was. Chicago more or less started at Fort Dearborn. Yes, du Sable was here before the fort. (And the site of his house is at Pioneer Square, which is across Michigan Avenue from the Wrigley Building. The site probably merits its own entry, but for now it's here.)

Anyway. Fort Dearborn stood at the intersection of Wacker and Michigan. Two of them actually. The first was built in 1803 only to be destroyed in 1812 at the Battle of Fort Dearborn (which will probably also get its own entry). The fort was rebuilt in 1816, but by 1857 it was done for. It was razed, though Wikipedia makes it sound like some of it was still left to get burnt down in the Great Chicago Fire.

Today, there's very little to see. A couple of plaques and carvings are on the London Guarantee Building (360 N Michigan, mostly covered in scaffolding as of September 2014). The real deal to see is in the sidewalk. There are markers placed into the sidewalks at the corners of Michigan and Wacker that outline the location of Fort Dearborn. Or at least the portions of it that were where the sidewalks are now.

The Chicago grid

The Chicago grid is a relic of the 1785 Land Ordinance. Congress wanted to dispose, their word not mine, of the land they had purchased, again their word, from the Indians. They sent surveyors over the mountains to come out to the Northwest Territory and measure the land. It turns out that the system the surveyors used was the six mile by six mile township. When it came down to business in Chicago, that grid was divided up to give major streets every half mile.

How this pertains to a second grader
I used this as a way to explain why streets meet at the angle they do. I used the grid to explain how we get places in the city. Even how we use Elston to get places quicker. It is also good for showing the directions on a compass, because the streets line up with those. To help my daughter know which way is north, I told her that the numbers on houses get bigger as the streets go north or west. Of course that doesn't really help, unless you're on the north side and the planes are flying to O'Hare. If the plane crosses the street, bigger numbers are north. If the plane is flying with the street, bigger numbers are west.

Why bother? Part of it is that I want my daughter to learn how to get around. She's seven now, but soon enough she'll need to get around. So I can drop the knowledge of the surveyors coming to help her know how the streets are organized.

More about grids and surveying in the United States.

What's the big idea here?

I've been roped into homeschooling this year. My daughter claimed that CPS wasn't to her liking despite the good neighborhood school thing we've got going out here in the JP. We tried to dissuade her, but it wasn't going to happen. Instead, we're homeschooling. I've got some notion of what the deal is: I've been teaching Latin to home schooled students for the better part of a decade now. I've just not done the whole shebang.

Since we live in a great city of the world, there's no sense in leaving it out of the curriculum. I'm trying to add it in as enrichment stuff, though I suppose you could argue that this isn't necessarily enrichment. There's not going to be a lot of rhyme or reason to what I post, but I have a plan. You may need to try seeing the forest for the growing collection of trees.

Some of it might be obvious. Others I hope are a little bit inspired by a spark of home school madness. Even if you're not home schooling, I hope you find some use here.

The target audience is early grades of elementary school.