“Look, there's our first wild animal,” said Sneed B. Collard III, an award-winning Missoula children's author. “It's a wolf.”
“That's a dog,” corrected 7-year-old Macoy Perkins, one of six children who attended Habitat for Humanity's first Habitat and Nature Workshop for 7- to 10-year-olds.
“You're never too young to learn how important a home can be and we're hoping these kids, once they turn 16, will come out and help us build houses,” said Dave Chrismon, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Missoula.
During the first part of the workshop, Collard took the children to the Clark Fork River to explore and get inspiration for collages about different homes in nature.
He pointed out different birds, found swallow nests on the side of the Higgins Avenue Bridge, and told the children about the invasive plant knapweed.
After the 45-minute walk, the kids dove right into their collage project, making pictures ranging from the swallow nests on the bridge to an arctic fox in Alaska.
The children's eyes didn't miss anything, as 8-year-old Allissa O'Melveny demonstrated in her picture of the Clark Fork and Mount Sentinel.
As Collard and Chris Grimes, a volunteer, admired Allissa's artwork, Allissa nonchalantly picked up a black crayon and began to draw scorch marks on half of Sentinel.
After a quick snack, Collard started a slideshow of pictures from a trip he took in a submarine 1,000 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Bahamas.
He explained bioluminescence to the kids - deep ocean animals that light themselves. There were pictures of squid, shrimp, angler fish and other strange creatures that made some children shudder and others say, “Ah, sweet!”
“I just hope they learned to connect with nature a little more and learn that nature can be a source of joy and inspiration,” Collard said. “If they can appreciate that a little more, then the day's a huge success.”
“It seems like a program that can grow in success and we love to be a part of it,” said Jen Stone, operations manager for the Children's Museum, which donated the space.
Youth Week will continue through Saturday with many different ways for children to get involved.
“We just got started (doing programs for younger kids), but I hope we can do it again and include even more programs,” Chrismon said.
Brienna Boydstun is a newsroom intern at the Missoulian. She is a journalism student at the University of Montana.
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