Plants turn sunlight into food and provide the planet with oxygen in the process. WHOA.

Inspired to share our enthusiasm for environmental education, as well as what we learned at the Green City Teachers Course (a 5 week workshop offered by the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society) Joanna and I led a science club meeting with the following agenda:

Getting Stoked on Nature: Inquiry

I brought in a collection of leaves, pods, rocks, vines, bulbs, twigs, beans and seeds, and spread everything out on a table before my fellow NSTA members entered the room. Upon arrival people naturally gravitated towards certain objects and were then asked to select one or two that they liked best. Each person had a chance to talk about their object/s, what they liked about it, what they thought it might be, what they were curious about, and as a class we generated a list of terms relevant to the items we were examining. This setting allowed us to manipulate the objects and get a real close look at them; for instance unsure about the name or purpose of a particular spiky object attached to a tree branch, we broke the object open to discover it was filled with small seeds. This discovery guided a discussion about how trees grow and reproduce. Overall, a class could have extremely rich discussions that stem from such a student oriented exploration and inquiry session.

Sun, Soil, Water and Air

Joanna taught Race for the Sun, a game that positions students as water, soil, or air molecules as a means of explaining how they participate in the process of photosynthesis. One player is the sun and another a plant attempting to grow. The water, soil and air molecules are active and link up when the “sun is out” and go dormant in “nighttime hours.” It is possible to introduce a natural predator or environmental change to the game, making it harder for the plant to photosynthesize and grow successfully. The game is extremely interactive and helps students see the order of operations involved in turning sun, soil, water and air into sugar molecules (food) to nurture the plant’s growth. While it is certainly possibly to play this in a classroom, is ideally played outside.

Link instructions - Race for the Sun is credited to the Teva Learning Center, www.tevalearningcenter.org

Green City Teacher Material

We looked at cross curricular ideas for garden based programming. Scroll down to the bottom of the page on the following site to see the awesome list.

http://www.growing-minds.org/plans/manual.php#chapter2

Eating Sunlight

We demonstrated how to sprout mung beans...an easy and tasty way to grow food for thought in the classroom.

Turn Green into Green

Furthered a discussion of fundraising possibilities for our trip to the NSTA Conference in New Orleans this spring. We determined a hypothetical budget for the entirety of our expenses.