Weeks 3 & 4 as a Fayette County Intern

I’m four weeks into my internship and I am still enjoying it and learning a lot.  The past two weeks have not been near as busy as my first two, but there were still a lot of things to do.  Most of the time was spent at the office planning future programs. 

One of the programs I worked on is a forestry day camp that I will be teaching late June and early July, this will be a three-day camp focusing on tree identification.  The first day will consist of the different ways to identify trees by looking at the over all structure of a tree as well as the leaves and bark.  I will also go over leaf collections, since by the end of the camp students will create a small leaf collection to enter in the county and state fairs.  These collections will consist of ten to twenty different leaves from trees that are native to Kentucky.   After going over the basics we go to some of the parks around Lexington to identify trees, collect some leaves, and talk a little bit about urban forestry.

On the second day we will go the Red River Gorge to work on identification and collect more leaves.  This will allow students to see the differences between an urban forest and a traditional forest.  Also it will allow them to collect leaves from trees that might not be as common in Lexington.

On the third day we will assemble the leaf collections.  Each leaf collection will consist of pressed leaves gathered on the previous days.  There will be one leaf per page and it will be clearly labeled.  The labels will include the common name, scientific name, most common use, county where it was collected, date it was collected, and its habitat. 

I’m really looking forward to this project since environmental education is something I am very passionate about, especially forestry.  It also looks like I will have a good turn out for the camp because most of the students I have talked to seemed very interested in the subject.

I also had the pleasure of helping out with an elementary day camp this past week.  This was a four-day camp where students got to see what it is like to be in 4-H.  This was a great camp, I had a blast and gained valuable learning experience when it comes to working with kids.