By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—Kids are born curious about nature. They love to be outside, looking at bugs and worms and bones and all the fascinatingly gross stuff nature is made of. They’re new to the world and they want to understand it. The Four Winds Nature Program (“Four Winds”) has spent decades trying to harness that natural curiosity in order to teach science in a way that 3rd and 4th graders can both comprehend and enjoy.
Four Winds is an educational program that trains and sends community volunteers into local elementary schools to teach about various aspects of the natural world as a supplement to the children’s other classroom learning. It was begun in the early 80s by the Vermont Institute of Natural Science (VINS), which people today may know primarily for its raptor program in Quechee.
VINS created the Environmental Learning for the Future (ELF) program, sending staff out into communities to train volunteers. The volunteers would then take their new knowledge and materials—some provided by ELF and some gathered or made by the volunteers themselves—into classrooms once per month during the school year. In 2006, some staff from ELF broke away and formed the nonprofit Four Winds, which has continued the program throughout Vermont and neighboring states.
In Brandon, the program was run by Sue Wetmore and Mary Lou Jenson pretty much from the start in the 1980s. They were eventually given the first-ever Jenepher Lingelbach award for their service to the program.
“I was brought into it by Kathy Dick,” said Wetmore. Dick was married to a prominent local doctor. “She said, ‘You like nature. What do you think of doing this?’ She got me hooked.”
Wetmore does indeed like nature. An accomplished birder, she won the Julie Nicholson Citizen Science Award from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies in 2019. She and Jenson brought that love of science and the natural world to Four Winds for 38 years—until Wetmore retired from the program—teaming up for puppet shows that made even potentially sensitive subjects, such as reproduction, silly and fun.
“We had a puppet routine with Peter Pollen and Esther Egg,” recalled Jenson with an impish laugh. “Sue played Esther like Mae West. I wasn’t as good as Cary Grant.”
There are five concepts in the Four Winds program—ecosystems, patterns in nature, earth, structure and function, and cycles in nature—each of which is taught in monthly sessions over the course of a year. The sessions often include exploration of the school grounds to identify examples of the concepts learned in the lessons.
Over the years, thousands of Neshobe 3rd and 4th graders have participated in the program, some growing up to become volunteers themselves, like Courtney Satz, who grew up in Brandon and now runs the show with Jenson.
“Mary Lou and I share responsibilities,” said Satz. “But the past few years have been really hard with not enough volunteers.”
In addition to Jenson and Satz, the program relies on volunteers to attend the trainings and conduct the sessions at Neshobe. Though many volunteers over the years got involved because they had kids in the targeted grades at Neshobe, there’s no requirement that a volunteer have kids in the program or even any children at all.
“You just have to like kids, science, and nature,” said Jenson. “You just go into the classroom and do the fun stuff.”
“They give you everything,” added Wetmore, referring to the copious materials that Four Winds provides. Volunteers are free to create their own props as well, as evidenced by the array of wonderful hand puppets—including a delightfully realistic porcupine—that Wetmore and Jenson created to supplement their lessons.
Because of the shortage of volunteers, as well as COVID restrictions in recent years, the Neshobe program has been trimmed from monthly sessions to five sessions per school year, each lasting 1.5 hours. The program has been designed to dovetail with state and federal educational standards and is included in the annual school budget.
And both Jenson and Satz have been eager to pass the baton to a new leader to coordinate the program for Brandon. Just this past week, Jill Doody, a paraeducator at Otter Creek Academy in Leicester, has agreed to take on the task. Even with a new local coordinator, however, the program is still in dire need of volunteers for the actual classroom work.
Wetmore, Jenson, and Satz have all worried that without additional volunteers, the program will simply end at Neshobe.
“It died out in Shrewsbury,” noted Jenson. “We don’t want that to happen in Brandon.”
Anyone who might be interested in volunteering for the program should contact Courtney Satz at courtneysatz@gmail.com.
