Published in
Green Teacher : Education for Planet Earth - Transforming School Grounds.
Issue 47 April - May 1996.
email: tgrant@web.apc.org
It's spring. Birds are chirping, trees are budding, and the ground is beginning to thaw. Who wants to stay in a stuffy old classroom? Not me and my students, which is why we're going outside. We're not goofing off, we're creating a computerized field guide to the world of nature around our school. Over the next six weeks, we'll use our school yard as an outdoor classroom, collecting information about the flora and fuana we find. Then we'll take advantage of the computer to turn our findings into a field guide. We'll put our technology, art, research, and science skills to work, and have a wonderful time in the process!
May is the perfect time to try a similar project with your students. You'll need a program such as Clarisworks or Microsoft Word and Works, Superpaint or another friendly draw program, colored pencils, fine tipped markers, pens, clipboards, jounals, paper, a specimen jar for collecting insects, magnifiers (page magnifiers work great), a classroom camera, film, and an interest in the ecosystems surrounding your school.
To launch the activity, we bring out field guides and show examples from naturalists sketchbooks, then we discuss why the guides are useful and important. (This is the time to invite a local naturalist to share her methods of recording observations with your class - and start your outdoor studies together). We make field sketchbooks out of sheets of blank white paper (bring out those bookbinding lessons - try marblizing the covers) and discuss how we'll use them to make notes about and sketch the plants, insects, birds, and other animals we see on the school grounds.
Next, we show students how to set up a database. We design a standard form with which we can record our information. Catergories include common name, scientific name, family, discoverer (student name), date, location, habitat, and unusual features. Later,these can easily be sorted by any category for introducing approaches to research, and for answering questions that are generated as you go.
During class time, at lunch, and at recess, students write down the names (or descriptions) of plants, insects, and animals they see on the school grounds in their sketchbooks and draw pictures of them. They may bring in leaves, insects (in observation bottles), and rocks indoors to examine under magnification. Using field guides, students identify and research their finds and record relevant information in their sketchbooks. Weekly, we input this informatioin into the database. As our database grows, we come to see just how many kinds of flora and fauna are around our school.
To assemble our field guide, we first sort the database by families and print it out. We use the printout as an assignment sheet- each student is responsible for writing up one entry for an individual species of animal, bird, insect, or plant for the field guide. As students finish researching, writing, and checking their entries, we format them to fit the field guide's design. We create an empty box at the bottom of each page in which students can paste in drawings, photographs, or photocopies of items they've described. Students with advanced skills may use a drawing program to create computer images for their pages. At the same time, student drawings can be photocopied, sized, and set on individual pages with their observations. Keep this collective work in a loose leaf notebook for general use. If you have access to a scanner, scan the drawings and import them onto an electronic page with student observations about their finding. Have students do their preliminary drawings in pencil and go over them with black ink for photocopy purposes. Add color afterwards for binder submissions. In June we will print out the pages, add the artwork, make a title page, bind our book, and then donate a copy to the school library for other students to use and enjoy. The town library may also be interested in a copy.
In our schools this is an ongoing project. Each year parents, children, and teachers hold a spring workday, caring for the plants and the schoolgrounds. Mulching, fertilizing, pruning, and general upkeep take place. We choose one or two new species of trees or shrubs to add to our yard and plant them on the workday. I have found that the plants which I can't kill at home are candidates for the schoolyard. We try to reflect the diversity and richness of the New England seasons and have planted forsythia, lilacs, flowering crabapples and dogwood. High school students work with us creating murals based on the elementary science curriculum and old ones are touched up, while a new one may be hung on the chain linked fence. This project develops a strong sense of community as it encourages all ages and many groups in town to join in. Local gardening clubs, naturalists, commercial landscapers and greenhouses, each have something special to contribute, and they enjoy seeing children take an active role in their local environment. Children become more sensitive to the common elements of nature as they learn to be keen observers of their environments. Often through these exercises, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. For the first time, some children will carefully examine the ant with a magnifying glass and see it in a new way. Through their observations, students explore and experiment in their backyards, and learn ways scientists record information. Many of the skills they have gained through different subject areas come together in this study of their schoolyards. This field trip doesn't require permission slips, busses, or fundraising; just open the doors and get started.
You may be familiar with this wonderful curriculum from University of Wisconsin
that uses two litre bottles to create habitats and desktop biology experiments
with plants. We have created our own version out of 6 gallon water bottles from
Polar Corporation (the kind you see in office buildings). Working with The New
England Science Center in Worcester, MA. we made jigs to cut out bottle sections
and replace them with clear plexiglass and screening.A page magnifier is velcroed
to the side of each bottle and Voila! - we have a great insect and small animal
habitat for observation. Of course, all visitors are respectfully and carefully
returned to their natural environment after their visit.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Plant Pathology - Fast Plants
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
608-263-2634 Fast Plants/ Bottle Biology
Author's Note: this project is an outgrowth of a decade long project transforming a school into a museum school model. Please visit our homepage Explore and Discover: A Museum School Model - http://world.std.com/~brd
Bruce R. Dean, a United States Christa McAuliffe Fellow '93, has taught art in the Uxbridge Public Schools since 1982. For the past four years he has worked with Lou Fraga, Hopedale science and math teacher and Uxbridge parent, and students on creating exhibits where children explore nature through art, science, and mathematics. Explore and Discover is an ongoing community project that transforms schools into museum/school environments.