The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum is offering booklets.
The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum’s new, COVID-19-borne educational program, Maritime on the Move, is now offering booklets in English and Spanish.
Maritime on the Move brings museum-quality experiences to sites throughout Santa Barbara County, incorporating engaging activities for students to enjoy outdoors while exploring local ecosystems and biomes in their own backyards.
Each activity or field trip is tailored to individual needs and adapted for all grade levels.
Materials include an activity booklet, infographics and videos to introduce each area. Pioneered with more than 150 middle school students from Carpinteria in February, they were initially focused on Carpinteria’s salt marsh, beach, tar pits and seal rookery, but the museum prepared more for the Santa Barbara Harbor and Oso Flaco Lake in Guadalupe.
Materials on the Santa Ynez Valley and Lompoc are also in the works.
Soon the program will be offered in several modes: in the field in-person with a naturalist, as a self-guided tour, live and/or pre-recorded in-the-field webinar and in-classroom with a naturalist.
The museum has been redefining its programs to continue to serve and educate the community while complying with social and safety restrictions, keeping in mind the growing body of evidence linking direct exposure to nature as essential for a child’s healthy physical and emotional development.
Programs that were previously offered by the museum in schools and on field trips are now offered via video and virtual components, self-guided tours in the field, individual activity kits, teacher-training materials and guided tour maps.
The museum’s goal is to instill a sense of motivation in children to take action to keep the area’s natural world healthy and develop the critical thinking skills needed to understand the complexities of ecological problems faced today.
Resources are available at sbmm.org/at-home/.
email: gmccormick@newspress.com
