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.)