Hmmm...I got to thinking about my first PLT experience back in the dark ages...it was November, 1980...I was in college and my father was president of our local Audubon society in Boca Raton, Florida. He ran several PLT workshops for high school teachers and elementary school teachers. I was his trusted assistant. (I just rummaged through my environmental books and found my first copy of the PLT book with my Dad's handwriting on it. And, inside, were the lessons we did for Broward County's Ramblewood Elementary School in Coral Springs, FL ... A PLT Safari for Elementary teachers where they had to journey through their Elementary PLT book and search for a list of items (kind of like a scavenger hunt, but in this case to find activities with specific topics), Water You Know, Plant Personification, Vacation Home Simulation, Why Wooden Pencils, Did you see that Dogwood Bark?, and Invent a Game. We facilitated this workshop with two other legendary environmentalists in Florida...Frank Kapp and Jim Phillips. Ahhh...memories...

Let me give you a bit of background about my membership into this website.

I first met Pat Maloney at a Maine Tree Foundation/Project Learning Tree Forests of Maine Teacher's Tour in July, 2005. I was blown away by Pat's dynamic personality and her commitment to bringing the forest to students and vice versa! Since that time, the grade 9 and 10 teachers of Lewiston High School have become involved with a grant which emphasizes training teachers to become comfortable with some hands-on approaches to the outdoor environment with an emphasis on forests. Pat is involved with that grant and is providing us with some great opportunities to become conversant with PLT.

Since meeting Pat, I strive to get my students outdoors as often as possible. All the grade 9 teachers use the PLT activity titled, "We All Need Trees" as a hook to learning about forest sustainability, and we are brainstorming constantly to see how we can make our school forest classroom come alive, so to speak.