Before we went on our night hike, we played some Native American Games. We pl;ayed four different games. The first one was called ring toss. The rings were made out of muscadine vins and yarn. The rules are that you have to put the bigger rings on the ground and step a few feet back from the ring and try to throw the smaller ring into the bigger one. This game helps improve aiming for hunters. The next game was a hackey games except you use your hands instead of your feet. The ball was made out deer skin, deer hair and a deer tendon. The directions are to get in a circle and try to keep the ball in the air by batting it with the palm of your hand. You try to get as many hits as you can. This game helps improve your hand eye coordination. Then we played called kick the stick. First you make a circle on the ground with pine cones. Then you pick two teams; one called the wolves and one called the bears. Then you get one person not playing to hold the sticks in front of one person from each team. Then the sticks are dropped in front of each team representative. The players bribble around the circle and the first person around the circle wins. The purpose of the game was to work on foot and eye coordination and wroking on direction aond control. The last game was called bear skin throw rug. Players get ina circle and join hands. When a person says go, try to pull people onto the rug to get them out. Also you can get out by letting go of the person's wrist to your left. The purpose of the game was to build up strength and to be lightfooted and act quickly.
We started our night hike after the games. After we got to the bridge we sat down and talked about nocturnal animals. Nocturnal means that a animal has better night vision that day vision and comes out at night. Before we left we did an activity to see how light can mess up your night vision. We covered up our left eye and with our right eye we looked at a candle for about 15 minutes. Then we took our hand off our eye and realized how much better we could see with our left eye than our right. Our left eye was more used to the dark than the right. Also we learned that our pupils dialate to the amount of light that there is, We then talked about different kinds of animals. Some of them are bats, owls, racoons, opossums, and more. We also talked about how bats know something is in front of them. They send out sounds so that if something is in front of them sound will bounce back to them so they will know something is there. The closer the object is to them, the faster the sound will bounce back. After Dan explained all about nocturnal animals, we started on our night hike. When we started on the night hike, people were falling over roots and rocks, and slipping on leaves because we weren't used to moving around in the dark. We kept on walking for a while and then stopped to talk about theings we saw and heard. Dan asked us to stop and close our eyes to see if we could hear any animals. Some people said they heard a dog bark and some crickets. Then he explained to us that we would walk by ourselves toward a leader to we could experience walking by ourselves. When it was our turn becuase you were by yourself and didn't know exactly where you were going. Then everyone had started back. Even though we were a little scared we had a lot of fun and learned that it isn't that scary walking by yourself afterall. |