Join us over the next year for a variety of student and professional development training activities to learn about pollinators, gardening, and conservation practices. REGISTER to get more details about these opportunities during the year. PollinatorLIVE is geared to students in grades 4 to 8.
A web seminar will be offered for teachers on February 8 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. ET on “Designing, Planning, and Creating Schoolyard Gardens.” The webinar, being offered through the National Science Teachers Association, will present ideas on how to get started and how to use an outdoor classroom to meet education standards.
Mike Hill, landscape architect with the USDA Forest Service, will discuss how to get a schoolyard garden started including deciding where to put the garden, determining how large it will be, dividing responsibilities for who will be involved in planning and planting, involving students, deciding what to grow, and tackling landscape challenges. Mr. Hill has been centrally involved in developing and caring for a garden at Bailey’s Elementary School in Fairfax County.
Martin Bomar, a parent volunteer at Ashland Elementary School in Prince William County, Virginia, and an employee of the USDA-Farm Service Agency in Washington D.C., will discuss how gardens can be used for hands-on learning opportunities for young students. The school staff, students, and parents created an Earth Day Garden in spring 2009. Since then, the garden has provided a growing collaborative, sustainable outdoor teaching environment to satisfy teachers’ and students’ quest for knowledge and provide continuous service-learning opportunities.
This garden evolved to ensure the outdoor area would support and enhance concepts within all six grade levels of Virginia’s Science Standards of Learning. Ten major areas of teaching emphasis were developed in the garden to accomplish this goal: food production, pollinator garden habitat, fruit production, water garden, recycling and composting, soil conservation, weather data recording, outdoor classroom, recreation and reflection, and a sensory garden. With the assistance of many stakeholders, within the school and from the school community, and with the complete buy-in by the school administration, students and teachers were quickly able to “dig in.”
CLICK HERE to test whether you can watch the webcast on the day of the event.
CLICK HERE for a video welcome to PolllinatorLIVE from USDA Forest Service host Tamberly Conway.
In May 2010, a webcast about “The Insect Zoo in Your Schoolyard” was held at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. CLICK HERE to watch the streaming video and learn about pollination, pollinators, participatory science projects, the latest about monarch butterflies, and how to attract pollinators to your schoolyard.
A web seminar was held on March 24, 2010, about schoolyard gardens. One way to help pollinators and reconnect today's children to the outdoors is through gardening. Schoolyard gardens can be outdoor classrooms where they hone their academic skills and nurture their innate curiosity and creativity. Eliza Russell and Nicole Rousmaniere from the National Wildlife Federation discussed essential features of schoolyard gardens. Principal Cindy Wrenn discussed how the garden was planned with an instructional focus and the ways it continues to be a central part of the K-5 curriculum. CLICK HERE to go to the archive of the web seminar. http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/symposia_seminars/PollinatorLive/webseminar1.aspx.
Hosted by the National Science Teachers Association