Families

Calgary Captured is a multi-year wildlife monitoring program run in partnership with the City of Calgary, Miistakis Institute, Friends of Fish Creek Provincial Park Society, and Weaselhead/Glenmore Park Preservation Society. The program aims to increase knowledge on our urban wildlife to inform development and management decisions, as well as to engage the community to spread awareness of wildlife. Calgary Captured enables you to join their team and help classify trail camera photos by identifying the animals you see. By participating not only will you help with the massive and very important task of identifying wildlife, you get a first hand look into who calls Calgary home.

See the Collections to view all photos taken by the wildlife cameras. 

Orange Marks the Spot is a series of 6 lessons, each about an hour in length, that are designed to introduce students ages 5-12 to orienteering. Skills covered in the lessons include: cardinal directions, navigating a course, and applying navigation and outdoor exploration skills. 

Forests, Fins & Footprints is a community-funded documentation of clearcutting in the Ghost Valley — a watershed located just upstream of Calgary, on the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The film interviews environmentalists, biologists, geologists, and people who live and work on the land. How does clearcutting affect an area's water, landscape, and wildlife, as well as the people living in that watershed? How will clearcut forestry impact the future? And how can we as a society move forward more thoughtfully?

The website also shares ways that you and your students can take action.

Download the eBird app to add your bird sightings and explore birds and hotspots near you! 

Nature Alive Adventures provides customizable outdoor experiences right to your school parking lot or to an outdoor space near you. They provide instruction in outdoor skills (e.g. animal awareness and tracking, natural fiber cordage, fire lighting, shelter building, etc), quinzhee building, and more! Nature Alive Adventures also provides day and overnight trips with snowshoes and freight toboggans. They are certified instructors with Paddle Canada to provide canoe instruction, guided trips, and certification.

Their YouTube channel provides in-class resources and instruction in a variety of outdoor pursuits and topics, as well as providing Nature Minutes, short videos with follow up activities that are meant to challenge kids to get outside.

To get in touch with Nature Alive Adventures, contact Dale and Colleen Kiselyk 780-305-6921
 

Record your sightings of animals and plants and contribute to citizen science! iNaturalist has also launched a new app for kids called Seek! Use the power of image recognition technology to identify the plants and animals all around you. Earn badges for seeing different types of birds, amphibians, plants, and fungi and participate in monthly observation challenges.

The Alberta Community Bat Program provides an Alberta Bats Colouring and Activity Book for elementary grades, a documentary about Alberta bats and the challenges facing their populations, and a guide for building a bat house. You can also take part in citizen science to help researchers learn more about the species of bats in Alberta. As part of the Alberta Community Bat Program, WCS Canada is compiling one of Alberta's largest databases of bat observations. Contribute your data and help better understand the distribution, habitat use, and seasonal timing of bat activity. There is a Bats of Alberta group on iNaturalist! Download the app to add your bat sightings!

Fun for all ages, Sort it Right! teaches youth and adults how to sort waste materials into the black, green, or blue bins, as well as household hazardous waste drop-off and landfill throw 'n' go.

The City of Calgary also has a lesson plan to learn about how Calgary's recyclables are sorted, how Calgary's compost is made, and how to prevent food waste.

The Alberta Hunter Education Instructors' Association provides free, downloadable and printable workbooks and videos for all ages on a variety of topics, including:

• Junior Wildlife 
• Know Your Knots 
• Survival Kit Essentials 
• Tick Awareness 
• Map and Compass Basics 

The Alberta WaterPortal Society has two online learning tools and a teacher guide with learning outcomes and connections to the Alberta curriculum to support educators in using these activities. All of the online resources from the Alberta Water Nexus project focus on how there are complex interconnections between our water resources, agriculture and food, and energy production. By thinking about the connections, we can innovate and improve as a community. 

• Follow the Drop: A choose-your-own-adventure game where users travel as a drop of water through the Bow River watershed. We explore the many different water users and how water quality changes as it goes down the river.
• Video Series: Through six animated videos of 2 minutes each, the viewer gets to explore concepts like how all water users in a watershed are connected, how population growth will increase the demands for food and energy, how farmers protect water quality through practices, and how a healthy environment supports all activities in the water. The videos provide excellent visuals to help students understand the concepts.