Into the woods
Students learn history, nature skills at river bluff
In 1804, the explorers George Hunter and William Dunbar made their way to a high bluff overlooking the Ouachita River in present-day Clark County during what President Thomas Jefferson called the “Grand Expedition of Discovery.”
On Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, 141 fourth-graders from Peake Elementary School in Arkadelphia followed in the explorers’ path, marching into the woods off Arkansas 8 in Arkadelphia.
Like the explorers before them, the students, ages 9 and 10, were there to study the landscape and learn more about nature around the embankment, which is 120 feet above the river.
Mike Reynolds, chairman of the department of kinesiology and leisure studies at Ouachita Baptist University, led the student expeditions, aided by students in his department and students from a similar program at Henderson
State University.
“These students will be teaching at schools or in parks after graduation, and this affords them a chance to teach a group of fourthgraders in and about the outdoors,” Reynolds said. “For the past three years, OBU students and I have sponsored place-based educational opportunities for more than 700 elementary students at the Ouachita River Bluff. This is the first group from Arkadelphia.”
Place-based education is rooted in what is local — the unique history, environment, culture and economy of a particular place, he said.
The bluff area makes a great classroom, Reynolds said.
“The area has marvelous views of the Ouachita River, the pine woods of the Gulf Coastal Plain to the east and south, and the Ouachita Mountains to the north and west. It is easily accessible, yet you get a feel of being in the woods.”
Tina Calhoon, a teacher at Peake Elementary School, said the outdoor classes make students more aware of their surroundings.
“It is good for the students to know that this place and its history are in their own hometown,” she said. “Too often, the importance of things close by are overlooked because they see them every day.”
Calhoon said she also learned more about the history of the area and the Hunter-dunbar Expedition, which was one of the Louisiana Territory explorations that included the larger and more famous Lewis and Clark Expedition.
On Tuesday morning, 75 students from the three fourth-grade classes at Peake moved around the bluff area visiting four learning stations manned by university students.
At one station, the youngsters learned about the principle of “Leave No Trace,” meaning that when visiting the forest, hikers and campers must do all they can not to harm the natural condition of the location they visit and to make sure they carry out everything they might have carried into the wild, especially the trash they make while there.
“If you drop an apple core in the woods, it could take as long as two months for it to break down,” said Justin Kirst, one of the OBU students teaching the Peake students.
He said newspaper can break down as quickly as in six weeks on the floor of the woods, but plastic objects and aluminum cans remain practically forever.
Around an old campfire, Reynolds showed the students how the small branches of nearby trees had been broken off to fuel the fire.
At another station, the students found their location on maps and learned to use a compass.
The fourth-graders were asked to come up with a sentence to help them remember the compass points: north, south, east and west. The boys in the class devised the sentence “Never Eat Soggy Worms,” as their mnemonic device.
A canoe was used to tell the story of the HunterDunbar Expedition up the Ouachita River. As the OBU students told how the explorers made their way up the river that flows below the bluff, all the Peake students had an opportunity to sit in a canoe that had been set in the clearing, and they could pretend to be paddling upstream. Along the “way,” the students would encounter rapids like the explorers found near Malvern, and the students in the canoe would have to lean one way, then the next, to “maneuver through the white water.”
Lillian Harber, one of the classroom teachers, said that while her class had studied Lewis and Clark, they had not talked about the Hunter-Dunbar journey into Arkansas.
A highlight of the students’ trip was allowing them to look at the view from the bluff, standing at a safe distance from the edge.
This might be one of the last opportunities to see the bluff, also often called the Desoto Bluff, in its completely natural state. The city of Arkadelphia, with the aid of Shelly Loe of Southern Bancorp, has received a $80,215 grant from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to build a trail to the bluff, including a safety rail.
Arkadelphia City Manager Jimmy Bole said the trail will connect with the Feaster Trail system through the city and give walkers easy access to the bluff and will be accessible to the disabled. In the past several years, the city has looked for a way to bring more people to the bluff area, including a proposed Caddo Indian Museum at the site. Now it appears the trail will be the only development in the woods.
Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.com.