During the past few weeks on our trips to Los Arboles (LAMS), we have introduced the students to the differences between climate and weather, used photo elicitation to visualize their perception of climate change in their community, played games to understand local food webs and how they are impacted by outside stressors like climate change, and planted eight oak trees on school grounds. Some of these lessons were more successful than others; we played the food web game on a day when we originally planned to plant trees, but were stuck inside due to a storm, which seemed to make the students restless. Over the past two weeks, CSUMB students developed five project proposals which we hoped to implement over the remainder of the semester, including a pollinator garden, a green wall, a berry garden, a walk/bike to school day, and a school sustainability audit. During our last visit, we pitched our ideas to the students, who then rated how interested they were in each one, and picked the top two projects they were interested in. I was a member of the pollinator garden group, which proposed planting native flowers to attract a variety of pollinators, creating illustrated plant markers, and building bee hotels. Written feedback from the LAMS students showed they were more interested in the pollinators themselves than learning about native plants, so we adapted our plan to include more hands-on projects, including painting hummingbird feeders and potentially raising butterflies from caterpillars. We plan to incorporate learning about how native plants and pollinators depend on one another, and how they are affected by climate change and other human impacts. The LAMS students are slowly warming up to us, though engagement remains mixed. My hope is that working on a project they expressed interest in will help increase their engagement and give them an opportunity to have fun learning and giving back to their community.
0 Comments
|
AboutKris Rose's Capstone Blog, from Projects in Environmental Education, Spring 2023, CSU Monterey Bay. Archives |