Last week was the first session of the year for our SEEDS7 Watershed Detectives Partnership. I taught the same lesson 18 times to four different teachers' classes at two different middle schools. This session was essentially an introduction to the refuge and to water quality as they will be seeing us several more times throughout the year in their classrooms, followed by a final field trip out here to the refuge to put what they've learned to the test and do some water quality testing out in the field. This visit consisted of an observation based "experiment" using the bottles in the pictures here as well as photos of blue green algae blooms on Lake Lowell. The bottles are the result of my previous adventure into the lake as each contains lake water and a reed/stick with algae growing on it. The above picture shows the two variables that were introduced to two of the three bottles in each set. The idea was that bottle #2 (containing plant food) would have the most algae growth, bottle #3 (containing vinegar) would have the least or none as the algae would be killed by the vinegar, and bottle #1 (the control, containing only lake water) would be somewhere in the middle- likely closer to #2 than #3. The students made observations about their set of bottles and most came up with the expected results, which was great!
Overall, the week went fairly well and we only had a handful of students who acted up and didn't really want to participate. Most of the kids were pretty engaged and came up with some pretty solid observations and questions. I'm excited to see how the rest of this partnership goes!
How Neat Is That?!
The Winter Day Camp event I have been preparing for took place this past Saturday and I'd say it went well. I ended up with 13 kids showing up to learn about animal winter behaviours like hibernating, migrating, and insulating. I planned a bunch of educational games like Oh Deer!, How Many Bears?, and the migration four corners game I created for a classroom program earlier in the year. We also did a blubber demo, a scavenger hunt, spent some time with the touch trunk, and went on a winter hike to look for animal tracks- which proved to be super successful as there were TONS of tracks throughout the refuge in the fresh snow from the night before! It was cool to see something I planned and organized entirely on my own work out so well!
