Little Red Schoolhouse teaches lessons about plants, wildlife

The Little Red Schoolhouse in Willow Springs was the area's first school building when it was built in 1886. While it stopped being used as a classroom in 1948, it continued to teach lessons to adults and children after reopening in 1955. For more than five decades, it has taught visitors about the plants and animals that populate the woods and waters of the Cook County Forest Preserves.

While the historic building is still open to be explored, most of the resident animals and popular exhibits have a new home in the neighboring Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center, which opened in July.

"We wanted to keep the same feel of the old schoolhouse," naturalist Deborah Ripper said.

The 17,000-square-foot nature center dwarfs the 600-square-foot Little Red Schoolhouse, which Ripper said visitors typically only spent about 15 minutes in. Now families spend upward of an hour checking out all that the nature center has to offer.

Visitors enter into an interactive room. A set of three huts are meant to imitate a prairie, a woodland and a wetland beaver dam and have corresponding activities like stacking branches or using wood blocks to create fox, deer and woodchuck tracks on a sand table. Other activities include puzzles, books and a touch table where kids can handle pine cones, deer bones and a turtle skeleton.

"Everything in the building is made for kids' eye level," Ripper said. "We want them to have a good experience by getting up close."

A large diorama shows the location of the nature center along with other local forest preserve attractions like the multiuse trail, ponds, fields and meadows. Signage describes the different local ecosystems, including details on the fossils found in the area, which was once a shallow tropical sea.

The nature center also provides information on the history of the area's Native Americans. A map on the floor shows the locations of different Native American villages in 1804, and a replica of a Potawatomi wigwam includes pots, a hearth, a bow and arrow and hanging gourds along with information on how the structure was built.

Kids can learn to identify different footprints, animal skulls and types of wood with a series of games where they can flip tiles over to get the answers. Drawers open up to display other things you might find in the area forests, such as honeycombs and bones, some of which kids are welcome to touch.

Fossils can be viewed under magnifying glasses, and there's even a particularly large fossil of a cephalopod that's embedded in a limestone wall. Progressing through the building takes visitors through time with fossils and illustrations of prehistoric sea creatures giving way to samples of moss and ferns and diagrams showing dinosaurs transitioning to mastodons, Neanderthals and modern humans.

The expanded space provides plenty of room to teach about animals living in the area today. The Field Museum donated a series of displays of foxes, raccoons, deer and squirrels.

All of the schoolhouse's animal residents now have bigger cages in the nature center. The Little Red Schoolhouse has provided a home for birds of prey that were injured or couldn't survive in the wild. The owls, crow and kestrel seem particularly pleased to have more room to stretch their wings.

Along with all of the original animals, the nature center displays more species including a wolf spider and her new babies, five types of snakes, toads, salamanders and insects, along with a bull frog and bass that previously were not on display.

One of the most popular new attractions is the turtle pond, home to a variety of species including a pair of endangered alligator snapping turtles that are fed live fish.

"You get the kids down here and they don't leave," Ripper said. "They love it so much."

<p class="factboxtext12col"><b>If you go</b></p>

<p class="factboxtext12col">Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center: 9800 Willow Springs Road, Willow Springs, (708) 839-6897, fpdcc.com</p>

<p class="factboxtext12col">Hours: 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday through Thursday. The nature center closes an hour early during winter months.</p>

<p class="factboxtext12col">Admission: Free</p>