Glencoe Third-Graders Pioneer the Somme Prairie

As the students in Bobby Johnson's third grade class stepped off the bus at the border of concrete parking lot and Illinois prairie, the energy level rose.

"I want to go into the trees and get lost!" shouted a student, as he pulled off his jacket.

With temperatures climbing near 70, the class from Glencoe West School tramped along into Somme Prairie behind Karen Holmes, a naturalist with the Cook County Forest Preserve District of Cook County. The class took a field trip to the prairie as part of a unit on the prairie -- one that nearly 4,000 students will complete, according to Holmes.

This is Holmes' third school year bringing students into Cook County's natural areas as part of the Mighty Acorns program, an effort to connect young students with nature. Typically, the program involves in-class lessons and two field trips -- one in the fall and one in the winter. Taking students to Somme Prairie is especially meaningful, Holmes said.

"This area has always been prairie," she said, standing among the prairie grasses. "For the last 10,000 years since the glaciers receded, it's been prairie so you can find some species here that you can't anywhere else."

The students looked at seeds and collected samples of turkey foot and Indian grass and then moved on to insect-catching under the trees. To the thrill of the students, Holmes caught a common garter snake after one student spotted it near a fallen tree.

"We started learning about the prairie a few weeks ago," Johnson said. "The class creates books where they'll draw examples of producers and consumers and decomposers."

Under the trees, Connor Delforge picked out what looked like a decomposer that had attached itself to the bottom of a tree trunk. He borrowed this reporter's pen to test its durability.

Another highlight of the trip was tasting the leaves of mountain mint, a native plant.

"I didn't know there was a plant that tasted like mint," BJ Moses-Rosenthal said.

Bella Leon, with a small, clear box in hand, hunted for an insect to examine.

"I'm looking for a caterpillar," she said.

The students will return to the prairie in the winter to study buckthorn.