The Helen Schuler Nature Centre is celebrating the start of the new season with a Spring Nature Fest on March 17th.
Education programming coordinator at the Centre Jessica Deacon-Rogers says there will be a mix of indoor and outdoor activities at the event.
“We have four community groups who are partners with us this year who will be bringing activities to the festival,” Deacon-Rogers says. “The Family Centre will have a nature scavenger hunt, with words in Blackfoot and English, and [families] can go out and discover some of the signs of spring along the trails. They also will have some Blackfoot hand games people can play.”
The Lethbridge College early childhood education program will bring loose parts, which are large items that can be played with outdoors, such as boxes, tubes and shovels. Deacon-Rogers says the items will be set up outside the Nature Centre’s doors for “kids and adults to build all sorts of different structures.” The Oldman Watershed Council will bring a new virtual reality experience looking at the region’s watershed and the different ways it can be taken care of. She says there will also be games related to water and the importance it has in southern Alberta.
“The City of Lethbridge’s waste and recycling department will be joining us as well, and they are going to have a sorting game where you have to sort different types of garbage into different types of bins,” she says.
The Nature Centre itself will have activities focused on pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, and the importance they play in nature.
The Spring Nature Fest will run from 1-5:00 p.m. on March 17 at the Helen Schuler Nature Centre. Deacon-Rogers encourages those wanting to attend to car-pool as parking is limited.