Begin by asking the children to span their strings over the most interesting ground they can find.  Give each child a magical magnifying glass, to shrink himself down to the size of an ant.  You may want to ask them questions to stimulate their imaginations: “What kind of world are you traveling through right now?  Who are your nearest neighbors? Are they friendly? Do they work hard? What is that spider going to do – eat you, or take you for a ride? What would it be like to be that metallic green beetle? How does he spend his day?

At the start, tell the children that they must keep their eyes no higher than one foot above the ground.

I clean houses on the side to supplement our income.  There is one house in particular I really enjoy cleaning.  The people are an elderly couple who love to talk about their experiences teaching.  Bill Walls was an outdoor science teacher.  He was telling me a story the other day of when he worked at a very strict school whose principal was the kind who felt children should be learning at their desks with their books before them which is very contrary to Bill’s way of teaching.  There wasn’t much of a school yard, but right on the other side of the school property line was a corn field.  Bill asked the farmer there if he could use the corn field for his class to which the farmer gladly agreed.  So out to the field they went.  According to the directions above, each student got down on the ground to start studying their little plots.  The principal, who needed to speak with Bill, came into the empty class room.  Bill described the principal wearing long sleeves, a tie, and a twitch usually in one eye.  Bill said that when he saw that the students weren’t in the class, BOTH eyes started twitching.  Out the open back door went the principal and found Bill standing at the edge of the corn field.  “Mr. Walls, WHERE are your students!?”  Bill, looked around wonderingly and replied, “Well, they WERE here just a minute ago”.  “Well, where are they now?  These are your students, your responsibility!!!  Where are they?”  his voice now beginning to crescendo.  Bill was quite enjoying himself.  “Hmm.  Maybe the wind blew them away.”  “MR. WALLS!  This is not funny….”  Just then, the bell rang for the students clean up and head to their next class and from the seemingly empty corn field popped all the students heads all at once!  The principal grumbled, “I should have known!”  and walked away. 

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