+BigWhiteTruck Posted March 28, 2006 Share Posted March 28, 2006 At the school where my wife works, the 8th grade has an Earth Day celebration each year on or near Earth Day, which is April 22nd. Some of you may know it as CITO day I have been asked by the organizers to run a geocaching presentation as one of the activities. Attending will be about twenty 8th graders (around 12-13 years of age). I will also have 4-5 chaperones at my disposal, and I have plans to beg borrow or steal at the very least 5 gps units for them to use, although I am shooting for 10. The rough outline will be that I will give an indoors presentation about geocaching to the children and chaperones, spend a little time showing them how a gps works and how to enter coordinates. After that I will send them all off in groups with one gps per group to find some multis that I will have hidden around the school grounds (with permission). I plan to have one multicache per group, and each multi will have enough legs so that each child in the group can have a turn with the gps. The final coords will take them to a cache of Earth Day stickers or something along those lines. The school grounds are pretty large so I won't have a problem hiding 20 "caches". I have almost 2 hours for my presentation. I would like to get some feedback from you guys with good ideas, or why I have a bad idea. Things to watch out for, etc. Especially if you have done this sort of thing before. Some Idea's that I have already given to myself: Print out a bunch of geocacher-U pamphlets. Print out a map of caches in the kids' town get permission for placements from school admins (they know i am coming) make sure I know how to work each gps unit I borrow explain to the kids that they need to be moving for the arrow to work Any and all feedback is appreciated. Quote Link to comment
Not So Lost Puppies Posted March 28, 2006 Share Posted March 28, 2006 Sounds similiar to what we helped with in February with a young scouting event (cub scounts and webelos). Though we didn't go into too much of the details on the GPS usage such as entering waypoints. We did hide 9 temporary caches in the park, and the kids came in groups through out the morning. We preloaded our GPSrs with all the cache coordinates and let the kids pick which ones. I'm not sure that the multi's and manually entering coordinates is the best way to go for an introduction to caching. Though I'm sure others think differently. I think the kids would rather go out finding them than doing the entry of coordinates. Also as part of the intro, let them know that caches should be kept secret from those that aren't part of the game. I'm sure they all know that there are some people that like to spoil other peoples fun by taking them and such. I'm sure that most would understand the term of "muggles" and how it could relate to geocaching. I would suggest NOT printing maps of the caches in town, but instead maybe let them know how many are within 5 or 10 miles. you also may want to pick up afew regular compasses for them to also use, since they can be handy for those times when you start to get close, since you don't have to be moving for it to work. It may also help if you can get some more cachers involved so that you might be able to have one go with each group to help out as needed. Quote Link to comment
+StarBrand Posted March 29, 2006 Share Posted March 29, 2006 Really emphasize the CITO aspects show them the geocreed website point out in clear language the difference between private and public lands tell them to have fun!! Quote Link to comment
+BigWhiteTruck Posted April 21, 2006 Author Share Posted April 21, 2006 Well folks, the day is here! There wound up being 15 kids, so I set 5 3-leg multis with the finals being the same ammo box out in the woods on school grounds. I have 6 gps's so I am gonna do 5 groups of three kids, each group will go after one multi. Each group will be carrying a bag for CITO, and I actually hid one cache inside a candy bar wrapper that was already at the hide site There will be a prize for the group with the most trash in their cito bag also. I've got 20 geocacher-u pamphlets printed out and folded up too. Hopefully it goes well, I will post tonight on how it went, probably with pictures too. Quote Link to comment
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