First grade students in Mrs. Laurie Myer, Mrs. Many Scarborough and Mrs. Amy Hill’s classes recently visited Turtle Point in Flomaton, Alabama. Students were treated to a wide variety of: hands on activities, interpretive exhibits which included live animals, fossils and taxadermic specimens, a nature walk to Big Escambia Creek, a first hand look at a bog garden and wetlands, all of which are native to Alabama.

Favorite activities of the children were: making animal tracks using molds and plaster, hiking through the nature trail on the boardwalk and learning about the animals and their habitats and the live butterfly house. The children also enjoyed seeing live local animals in both the indoor and outside science room and learning more about their habitats and characteristics.

Turtle Point is a division of the Escambia County Board of Education and is committed to connecting the classroom to the outdoors through hands-on environmental education. Visitors will enjoy an interpretive lab, a museum room, five teaching gardens and a boardwalk that winds through the wetlands of Big Escambia Creek. Interpretive exhibits include a living bee observatory; local fossils; taxadermic specimens; live animals; and a three-dimensional diorama of local wetland and longleaf pine ecosystems. Outside, visitors can stroll through an herb garden, vegetable garden, butterfly garden and a rock, fossil and mineral garden. The bog garden is filled with native carnivorous plants. The boardwalk takes you on a tour of the natural floodplain wetlands of Big Escambia Creek. While on the boardwalk, you can go up into the tree canopy on the arboreal walk.

Picture left to right: Aspen Gerald, Justin Hayes, Will Allen, Nathan Garner, and Joshua Hyatt, in the butterfly house.