Middle School Mayhem For America!

This week has been FULL of education programs with middle school students. I lead eight programs total Monday and Wednesday (each about an hour long) where I taught primarily eighth grade students about water quality and the macro invertebrates that serve as bio indicators. They learned about various ways to measure and test water quality (turbidity, pH, D.O., etc) but the activity focused on macro invertebrates. Students were given a tub full of various office supplies which represented different invert species that they then "sampled" from the "stream" and sorted into an ice cube tray. They then worked together to count each species and determine the percent composition of each category of invertebrates- from very pollution intolerant to vary pollution tolerant. They were able to draw conclusions about their possible water quality using this information.

On Tuesday, I returned to Kuna Middle School (the location of the surprise 120 students when we only expected 30) to lead a program about scat and tracks!! While I was a bit nervous about how another program at Kuna MS would turn out, I was excited to get to teach about tracks as that was my favorite program when I was a Ranger at UNF! Thankfully the program ended up going really well and we had a reasonable amount of students. I taught them about the different types of tracks, various gait patterns of animals and demonstrated what they look like, taught them how to look at a track and figure out what species it was (including how to differentiate between a cat and a dog species) and they had to look at a "track story" and figure out what was happening at the time the tracks were left. They concluded the lesson with a discussion about scat and a matching game using repli-scat from various species.

I'm happy to have finally had a slight break from sitting at a desk to get to go out and educate some kiddos.

How Neat Is That?!