Nature Notes: A Reflection on Dragonfly 4k
By Natalie Schnackenberg, WisCorps Environmental Educator Placement
Natalie Schnackenberg was a 2025-2026 WisCorps Environmental Educator Placement at The Ridges. Her position included helping with Dragonfly Nature Preschool.
From Newberry, South Carolina, Natalie graduated from North Greenville University in Tigerville, SC in 2023. She received a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a concentration in Animal and Environmental Science.
The Ridges Dragonfly 4k has wrapped up the 2025-2026 school year! It was a year full of play, giggles, and learning…
The goal of Dragonfly 4k is experiential learning through outdoor play. I can confidently say we accomplished that goal. Throughout the spring semester, 4k covered one topic a week, from ice and cold, to lichen and flowers. The curriculum was built to follow the phenology of our local ecosystems, so during the cold of January we studied the animal tracks we saw in the snow, and in March we observed moss as the snow melted away. More traditional subjects such as numeracy and literacy were woven into our daily learning; by counting the legs of an insect or sounding out “stormy” and “cool” as the class meteorologist.
It has been amazing to see how much their little minds have grown since I first met them! Students that struggled with communication in the beginning of the year are now joining in the conversation. They have learned to share, work together, and give compliments. It is a time when they are learning to use their brains and imagination, and we frequently discuss the differences between fact and fiction, real and pretend, and silly times versus serious times.
But by far our greatest success was teaching a whole flock of four-year-olds the word “hypothesis.” It started by hypothesizing whether we would see garter snakes on our daily walk into the forest. The question soon grew into a class tradition, and we could not go down the boardwalk without hypothesizing about our reptile friends. Then the subject matter diversified, and we hypothesized whether it would be cooler in the forest, if the frogs were calling, and what other students had for breakfast.
