The natural areas are a special place not only for people to enjoy but for school learning programs as well. The Ivy Creek Foundation seeks to utilize the natural area as an outdoor classroom of the natural world through our school programs. We offer a variety of programs for school age students. Our oldest program is the nature tours that we offer to schools or other groups led by trained volunteer guides. To keep the tours as valuable as possible we break up into groups of ten to twelve individuals each. With our significant number of trails and guides, a large number of students, teachers, and their guides are in the woods at the same time. Each group has a different and powerful experience each time they visit through the diverse habitat interpreted by the guides at Ivy Creek.

Other programs are offered during or after school hours or to groups not yet in school. The Junior Naturalists meet every other week for an hour and a half on Mondays after school. Toddler Time is for preschoolers (three to five years old) once a month on the last Thursday of each month.

Additionally, with the experience and knowledge offered by the guides and other volunteers we also offer outreach to the schools. For example, we offer our expertise in butterflies, specifically Monarchs, through contacts from the Cooperative Extension to schools working on Standards of Learning in Science on Life Processes. We are currently developing units for classroom use on skull forensics, local greening initiatives and resource conservation, Monarchs and stream monitoring. We have also assisted classes to develop a school project on a rain garden using native plants.

All of our programs are free, except for the one offered by Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH) as an addendum to our nature tours. In the fall the focus is “Trees of Virginia” and in the spring on “Birds and their habitat.” Because of our fiduciary agreements with the county and the city, the schools or groups make the payments directly to VMNH before coming to Ivy Creek.