The Endangered Wolf Center’s Education Coordinator wants your kid to make a mess. The messier the better, Ashley Rearden says.
She’s in the process of putting together the Center’s first Messy Play Day on Sunday June 29, a day when child ranging from the newly walking to age 5 will have a chance to play with mud, dirt, sand, water and paint, to name just a few things.
Why on earth?
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“Kids that age learn by being tactile,” Rearden says. So on Messy Play Day, activities will include sand exploration, mud and dirt fun, water play, watercolors, face painting and more. Kids and parents will learn how to make homemade all-natural play dough and many nature crafts.
Parents should dress their kids in clothes that can get filthy dirty, she says.
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The cost for Messy Play Day is $8 per child. Parents are free.
Special mini-tours of the Endangered Wolf Center animal enclosures will be available for an additional $10 per person that day only. There's no charge for a mini-tour for children enrolled in Messy Play.
Rearden expects the event to be very popular, so she’s encouraging parents to call 636-938-5900 to reserve a spot now. Walk-ups will be accepted based on availability.
Messy Play Day is just one example of Rearden’s effort to broaden the Center’s programs for children. This year, for the first time, the Center added five one-day mini-camps to its regular lineup of Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring camps. Each mini-camp had a separate theme, some of them rather unusual.
For example, Saturday May 17 was “Scat-ology Mini-Camp.”
“Poop tells us a lot,” Rearden says. “It tells us about an animal’s health, what they ate, what they didn’t eat. “
“Poop is one of the two signs (the other being prints) of the presence of animals,” Rearden says, noting that wolves in the wild are shy and rarely seen by humans.
Campers ages 6 to 15 learned about scat and its importance in nature
The last mini-camp (June 7) is “School’s Out – Get Ready for CAMP,” a primer on attending a full Summer Camp. Previous mini-camps included “Survival Skills,” “Learn to be a Naturalist” and “Poetry in Nature.” Information and registration forms for all the camps are on the Center’s website at http://www.endangeredwolfcenter.org/take-a-tour/camps/