Transformative Trail Games
Coming Back to Nature: Transformative Ecological Activities for Kids and Their Adults
Note: This blog is becoming a book titled Coming Back to Nature: Transformative Ecological Activities for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside
Introduction
Many adult members of modern consumer culture move through forests on paths, much as they would travel a road. We might notice the scenery as if looking at a postcard. Looking but never seeing through the branches, our experience is one of passing through, not immersion-in. In this post, we introduce two trail games we first encountered in the grandfather of all books on deep nature activities: Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature by Jon Young. Both of these games foster immersion and change our point of view in relatively wild ecosystems.
Activities
These games allow participants to see the forest, if not from the perspective of a deer or coyote, at least from a different perspective than that of a typical member of our industrial culture. We often play one or more of these games, Nature Tag - Tree Version or Nature Tag - Make Me One with Everything Version, while traveling from one place to another.
The Hide Along the Trail Game
This game goes by many names. We call it the Hide Along the Trail game because, you guessed it, kids hide along a trail and one or more seekers, usually including me, walk along the trail and try to spot them before walking past them. If the seeker passes them, the hider gets a point.
For this game to work, at least some of the kids need to know the trail and markers so you can establish limits to the game. For example, stay on the trail to Sunset Rock and don’t go past the creek. If all of the kids don’t know the trails well, I’ll ask them to group up so one person in each group knows the territory.
If any kids don’t feel like hiding, I tell them they are welcome to walk along with me. This gives us a chance to talk one-on-one about how they’re doing or anything else they want to talk about
There are different ways to limit the distance from the trail the kids can go to hide. One is to use a distance limit. For example, stay within ten feet (three meters) of the trail. The advantage of this method is it keeps the kids closer to the trail and easier to communicate with. It also puts the focus on camouflage, which I like to do at times. The other way to limit distance is to tell the kids that they need to be able to see the trail from wherever they are hiding. This gives them more freedom and feels more realistic to me.
I often give them feedback during and after the game about why they were easy or hard to see. If I have a group that does not yet camouflage themselves, I’ll get down on the forest floor and bury myself under debris to model the process.
As with all the nature tag, transformative treasure hunt, trail, and other games I play with kids, I make no effort to keep track of points. Sometimes kids ask how many points they have and I confess that I don’t keep track. Some of them keep their tally for a while, but in all cases, this has faded with time. It seems like kids don’t need to compete to have fun. That is something they learn from adults and quickly forget if given the opportunity.
The Deer and Coyote Game
This game simulates a pack of coyotes hunting one or more deer. When I play this game with kids, I am usually a deer along with any kids who would rather walk with me than hunt. The goal is for the coyotes to surround the deer. If a deer hears a coyote, the deer can turn around and point to, name, or describe any coyote they see. Coyotes who have been spotted return to the starting place, or the way we play, take some number of steps back. The deer start the game by walking, while the coyotes hang back until the deer are far enough away not to hear the coyote’s movements. My experience is that kids often think the best way to capture the deer is to run at the deer. This noisy tactic inevitably ends up with the running coyote being heard and sent back. I’m often the only deer, and when I am, I selectively don’t hear coyotes who try to be quiet and don’t spot coyotes when I turn around, if they're making an effort to hide. I try to balance hearing and seeing them so that I can give them feedback, with giving them opportunities to experience success. When I do hear or see them, I explain that coyotes are stealthy tricksters excellent at remaining invisible to their prey until the last moment when they use a burst of speed to capture them. I also talk with them about coyotes being pack hunters who use teamwork to surround their prey.
The Combined Coyotes Hide Along the Trail and Stalk Deer Game
When we play this game, one or more deer, again usually including me, walk down a trail with the rest of the group acting as coyotes stalking the deer. This is my favorite trail game. Not so much because of the game, but because it was created by one of the children in one of my groups after playing the above games. In this game, the coyotes run ahead and hide along the trail at various positions. If the deer passes them by, they remain silent and hidden until the deer has passed them and gotten far enough away that the coyote can emerge and begin tracking the deer. The idea is for the coyote to coordinate their actions to surround the deer. In addition to loving this game, because it was created by a young person, I also love this game because it requires the most teamwork and communication between the players. I recommend saving this game until your group has experience with the two previous games as they give the kids time to learn the hiding and stalking skills separately before combining them.
Education
Instead of talking about how I use these trail games in context, we’ve included some recent journal entries from days we’re my groups ended up playing these games.
04-05-22 Middles Nature Science - Week Eight
A fine class with another minor stumble at the beginning of class. The stumble started with my goal of wrapping up basic chemistry for now. This resulted in 50 minutes of “table work” which was a lot. We probably should have stopped after about 30 minutes. After that, they were done and I had to work to “keep them on task.” A good sign for me to shift activity. After that, we walked in the woods sometimes playing our “hide along the trail” game. While walking, we had lots of opportunities to follow up on our table work, talking about energy and the symmetry between photosynthesis and respiration. At some point “J” said to me like, we really are all in it together! The plants couldn’t make it without animals and we animals couldn’t make it without plants! We had a great time playing the “hide along the trail” game which affords the kids lots of opportunities to become part of the forest rather than just walking through it! When the kids wanted to be the seekers, I had to give them my phone to use as a timer. I enjoyed the inversion of the typical factory school protocol where teachers take kids' phones from them!
05-15-23 Early Elementary Nature Science – Week Eleven
We had a fine day though the kids were a little unhappy that it was warm and buggy. The kids had clear ideas about what they didn’t want to do (hike or build) and only one thing they wanted to do, play nature tag. So we did. This was not a problem from my point of view. For me, being ecological includes:
Being aware of our interdependence with our fellow travelers and our shared home.
Understanding how ecosystems continually regenerate themselves through a dance of interdependence.
Being familiar with the gossip (who does what with whom) in one’s home ecosystem.
Forming caring relationships with ourselves, others, and Mother Earth.
What once was tree tag and is now nature tag is fun and meaningful to the kids and provides me with a perfect opportunity to help the kids learn about the biotic and abiotic contributors to an ecosystem and who does what with whom (i.e., how they interact).
At some point, they got tired of tag and had nothing else they wanted to do. This led to some strained moments until I remembered that sometimes I need to supply a little more initiative. I suggested some other trail games and then working with cordage and we did and had a great time. Following the kid’s interests is critical and so is guiding, especially when no interests leap to the foreground for the kids!
05-24-23 Wednesday Elementary Nature Science – Week Eleven
I have learned so much from this group of children this year. As a Taiji player, the more energy you give me the better. These nine kids are my latest proof that this can work, even as I get older. This group loves to keep it moving and we did! Several of the kids mentioned wanting to go someplace new today, so we did. Once again, nature tag and other trail games to the rescue. Free play is great and critical for human development. Play can also serve as an amazing context for learning the names of ecosystem contributors and how ecosystems work.
We ate yucca flowers and male pine cones. At one point, I asked the kids, “If I told you to stop at a giant thing lying across the path that's full of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sugars, what would it be? They got it! A tree. We also discussed why walking uphill is harder than walking down (gravity is pulling us down), how we all share the same stuff, and kid questions like, “Where does the atmosphere get its carbon from?” One of the kids is super excited about collecting pieces of Mica (they used a pill bottle as a sample collecting container). His excitement provided an opportunity for us all to discuss the fact that all minerals are crystals but not all crystals are minerals.
10-25-23 Wednesday Nature Science – Week Eight
We had a great class. Some kids wanted to hike and play trail games, some wanted to work on fire, and some wanted to do both. We ended up coming to consensus about doing both and it worked great. In my journal for Tuesday’s class, I talked about how useful giving the kids lots of space is. Today’s emphasis was on laying out some clearly stated fire challenges and supporting the kids when they asked for help (My friend, Ricardo Sierra did a great podcast on working in nature with middle schoolers that reminded me of how well challenges work for middle schoolers). They all made great progress advancing through fire-starting challenges: get some tinder to flame first using a magnesium-ferro rod, then a hand lens, then work on your bow-drill set.
Kids usually come to my activities with an ask-permission mindset. On this day I reminded them that they don't have to ask me to go look for materials, they just need to tell me. I also encouraged the teens to socialize while they were working on various things. They didn’t need my encouragement, and I wanted them to know that it's common practice for folks to socialize while engaged in certain kinds of work.
For the second half of class we played the deer and coyote game and the hide along the trail game. They actually strategized about the deer game and got better at throwing themselves into the forest (burrowing under bushes and leaves, etc.). They also seemed to enjoy comparing their fingerprints as seen via a phone magnifier with tree-cross-section prints as a demonstration of the fact that we are nature!
I think my favorite thing about this day was the typically odd mix of activities held together by their connection to supporting the kids’ deep nature connection!
03-19-24 Tuesday Nature Science – Week Three
The kids wanted to play deer and coyotes and check out their forts. We came up with a couple of different plans and headed out, having decided to head towards the forts along a path well suited to the deer and coyote game as a group and to figure out what we would do after that on the fly. I paired new kids up with more experienced kids to play the hide along the trail game. They didn't like my pairings and came up with their own, which was great.
On the way to the trail, I talked with them about picking a local animal to focus on for the rest of this ten-week session. I let them know that this animal could just be one they were interested in, or they could think of it as their spirit animal. We also talked about similarities and differences between them and their spirit animals and about playing the hide along the trail game, after playing the deer and coyote game. One of the kids invented a way of combining these two favorite Coyote’s Guide games.
Science
The primary organizing principle for everything that I support kids making sense of is the idea that we (all ecosystem contributors including living and non-living members of ecosystems) are all in it together. One of the five big ideas, under this central idea, is that relationships in ecosystems tend to be mutually beneficial. Those that aren’t, including competitive, consumptive, predatory, and parasitic relationships tend to minimize harm and even provide benefit at the species level. We’ve written elsewhere about the wonders of mutualistic relationships between soil organisms. But what of coyotes and deer? It's hard to see the relationship between coyotes and deers as mutually beneficial. Is being eaten by a coyote a benefit to a deer that becomes a meal for a coyote pack? No, and the relationship between predator and prey populations and species is more complex than that. At the level of populations, coyotes prevent deer populations from expanding to the point where they overgraze their ecosystems. At the level of species, coyotes are a force of natural selection. And, consumption is not the only kind of interaction between species in a predator-prey relationship. As powerfully illustrated by the wonderful short film, How Wolves Change Rivers, these relationships are complex and include many other facets than population control and selective culling.
More generally, the image of a harmonious natural world is misleading. Much of what appears to be harmonious is a dynamic dance between antagonistic forces. Simply standing up requires different muscle groups to push in the opposite direction to achieve dynamic equilibrium. Balanced populations of different species in ecosystems are similarly achieved. Even the sharing of nutrients between fungi and plants involved in mycorrhizal relationships and between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and their hosts is worked out by balancing osmotic pressures from the organisms on each side of the exchanges. This kind of harmony may be better thought of as antagonistic cooperation, or, as I like to say, bumping into each other with style.
Peaceful human communities work similarly. Working well together is a dynamic dance between participants with diverse experiences, special gifts, and special needs. The goal is not the absence of conflict but the peaceful resolution of conflict. Again, bumping into each other with style.
In all cases, bumping into each other with style requires methods of coordination, and those methods often include very well-developed communication pathways!
Wrap Up
While some kids naturally dive into ecosystems, some need additional support, and all of us have something to gain by playing at seeing the forest from the perspective of some of our animal kin. Trail games, including those described above, can play an important role in helping us sense and be in the forest in different ways. In my groups, these games are often part of a mosaic of activities we do in one of our two-hour meetups, often while we’re on our way to or from some location. The fact that coyotes eat deer does not contradict my statement that “relationships in ecosystems tend to be mutually beneficial. Those that aren’t, including competitive, consumptive, predatory, and parasitic relationships tend to minimize harm and even provide benefit at the species level.” Even that relationship helps coordinate the functioning of ecosystems as a dance of interdependence.