by editor | Feb 22, 2010 | Marine/Aquatic Education
Beach Hoppers: Inquiry-based learning while having fun!
Field trips are exciting. Field trips incorporating inquiry-based learning and live animals are even better.
by Stephanie Schroeder
This second grade unit focuses on beach hoppers, tiny amphipods found on most sandy beaches. The first three lessons focus on learning beach hopper characteristics in the classroom and teaching students how to do scientific fieldwork. Once the students are beach hopper experts, they take a field trip to the sandy beach to conduct experiments on beach hoppers.
Background
On the west coast, there are primarily 2 species of beach hoppers, Orchestoidea californiana and O. corniculata. The animals reach lengths of 28 (1.1 inches) and 25 mm (.98 inches), respectively. Beach hoppers can be found along the mid tide line where the sand is neither too dry nor too wet. Typically, they can be found on both sheltered and exposed beaches, near washed up algae. It is best to go in search of them prior to the field trip. Look for small holes and start digging or look under algae in the wrack line. (Refer to the Beach Hopper Biology websites listed in the Resources section.)
A second grader finds a worm. (photo by Trish Mace)
Introductory Lessons
Lesson 1-Intro to beach hoppers-KWHL chart
Goal-how to ask good science based questions while learning about beach hoppers
Key concepts-Good science based questions help us learn information and sharing information is a good way to learn.
Show a picture of a beach hopper and describes where they live and sets up a chart, labeled ‘Beach Hoppers’ with four columns-what we know, what we want to know, how we can learn, and what we learned. Students are asked to provide their thoughts and ideas on the first three questions. If time permits, the instructor can label the picture of a beach hopper and go through its anatomy (antenna, eye, head, thorax, abodomen, walking legs, cheli) and discuss how the parts of the animal are used. (A beach hopper picture with anatomical labels can be found on the OIMB GK12 webpage, under Beach Hopper Unit Summary, see Resources section.)
Lesson 2-Can you jump as far as a beach hopper?
Goal-measuring and introduction to proportions by comparing how far beach hoppers and humans can jump (Relative to body size, beach hoppers can jump much further than humans.)
Key concepts-accurate measuring and proportions
This lesson incorporates live animals and math. First ask students if they think they can jump farther than a beach hopper. Divide the students into two groups. Each group measures both how far they and a beach hopper can jump. Measure the heights of students in group one. Lay a tape measure on the ground and record how far each student can jump. In group two, students put a beach hopper in their hand and measure its length with a ruler. To determine how far a beach hopper can jump, place a target with circles indicating 3, 6, 9 and 12 inches from the center on the ground. Each student puts their beach hopper in the middle and observes how far it jumps. Switch roles for groups and repeat. Introduce the concept of relative body size proportion, explaining how a beach hopper can jump much farther than a human. Determine how much farther a beach hopper jumps, compared to its body length, than humans can. (A worksheet can be found on the OIMB GK12 webpage, under Beach Hopper Unit Summary, see Resources section.)
Lesson 3-Wrap up and review, field trip preparation
Goal-prepare the students for the field trip and plan and discuss the field trip experiments
Key concepts-appropriate field trip behavior, how to ask a good question and conduct experiments
Lead the students in a discussion to decide and list good field trip rules and what the class needs to bring to the beach. Revisit the KWHL chart and have the students reflect on what they have learned about beach hoppers, what more they want to know and how, when they go to the beach, they could discover some answers. Lead a discussion on what the students will do on the field trip based on their responses. Guide them towards the three experiments planned for the field. The first determines where (high, mid and low) in the tidal zones beach hoppers live. The second examines what substrate beach hoppers prefer to live near. The final experiment looks at if beach hoppers hop in a specific direction when released.
Field Trip
Reconnaissance work will be needed to determine the best beach for the field trip. Factors include location, ability to easily locate beach hoppers, safety of the beach, human activity, and how much beach is exposed during low tide. Although an extreme low tide is usually not required, the tide must be low enough to expose the area of digging for the duration of the field trip.
Supplies
Shovels, buckets, sieves (a kitchen colander with small holes will work), clipboards, Rite in the Rain paper, pencils (Field trip data sheets can be found on the OIMB GK12 webpage, see Resources section.)
Divide the students into groups of no more then 10 students with at least one group leader and 2 helpers. Each group should have 3 shovels, 3 buckets, 1 sieve and 1 clipboard. Designate one student to be the recorder for each experiment and switch recorders for each experiment. Allow 30-40 minutes for each experiment.
Once the students arrive at the beach, hold a review session with the entire group to remind them of their 3 experiments and review beach etiquette (treat animals with respect, refill any holes dug, etc).
Experiment 1-Where do beach hoppers live?
The expected answer-they live at the mid tide line where it is not too dry and not too wet. Beach hoppers are poor swimmers and cannot live low on the shore where there is too much water, but will dry out if they are too high on the shore due to the sun. (Give students a hint that they should dig near holes). (See field journal sheet 1 on OIMB GK12 webpage in Resources section)
Have students predict where and why they think they will find the most beach hoppers. Start digging at the high tide line and have students count how many they find and record their data. After 10 minutes, have the students move to the mid tide line and repeat their search. After 10 minutes, repeat at the low tide line. Have them make observations about the size and color of the organisms.
Experiment 2-What do beach hoppers like to live near?
The expected answer-they prefer seaweed as that is what they eat. It also provides refuge from the sun and predators. (See field journal sheet 2 on OIMB GK12 webpage see Resources section)
Keep the students in the same groups and work in the mid intertidal where there are the most beach hoppers. Ask the students to list possible habitats-seaweed, rock, driftwood, and just sand. Start digging and have the students keep tally of how many beach hoppers they find near each spot. Have the students capture and place beach hoppers in a bucket containing some damp seaweed for the next experiment.
Hillcrest Elementary second graders on an inquiry-based field trip at Bastendorff Beach, Oregon. (Trish Mace)
Experiment 3-What direction will a beach hopper hop?
The expected answer-beach hoppers orient themselves according to the slope of the beach, jumping landward. This prevents them from moving downward on the shore where they would get into deeper water where it would be harder for them to swim. (See field journal sheet 3 on OIMB GK12 webpage in Resources section)
The students will hopefully have collected 20-30 beach hoppers. Lead a discussion on how the beach hoppers should be released (head towards the water, head towards the land, etc.) Students release equal numbers of beach hoppers at the high, mid, and low zones and observe the beach hoppers’ behaviors. Assign students the task of releasing one beach hopper at time and have them observe the direction they hop. One student will record the direction the beach hopper moved, writing if the beach hopper stayed there or continued moving.
If time remains, students can practice sieving sand and looking for other animals, seeing what lives where.
Post lessons
Many lessons, from a variety of disciplines can be created based on the field trip.
Examples:
Graphing-have the students graph the distribution of beach hoppers per zone (low, mid and high tide lines)
Day in the Life of a Beach Hopper-each student will write and illustrate a story depicting how a beach hopper would spend a day
Zonation poster-students can work in groups or individually to draw a poster showing what they found in different zones of the beach.
Credits
Jan Ward, Alix Laferriere, Merry Lojkovic, Kara Davidson, Ashley Binter, Ben Grupe
Resources
Beach Hopper Biology Websites
http://www.wallawalla.edu/academics/departments/biology/rosario/inverts/Arthropoda/Crustacea/Malacostraca/Eumalacostraca/Peracarida/Amphipoda/Gammaridea/Talitridae/Megalorchestia_californiana.html
http://www.answers.com/topic/beach-hopper
OIMB GK12 Beach Hopper Unit Summary
http://www.uoregon.edu/~oimb/Academics/GK12/field inquiries/beach%20hopper%20field%20inquiry.pdf
OIMB GK12 Field Trip Data Sheets
http://www.uoregon.edu/~oimb/Academics/GK12/field%20inquiries/Hopper%20Field%20Journal.pdf
by editor | Jun 26, 2009 | K-12 Classroom Resources, Place-based Education, Service learning
Citizens for a Healthy Bay’s Junior Bay Ranger Program
By Katrina Landau
In 2003, the Washington State Legislature passed ESHB 1466 that established the Natural Science, Wildlife and Environmental Education Partnership Grant program under the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). In the 2005-2006 inaugural year, Citizens for a Healthy Bay (CHB), a Tacoma based 501c3 organization, was one of the recipients.
This innovative partnership was created to promote “proven and innovative natural science, wildlife and environmental education programs that include instruction about renewable resources, responsible use of resources and conservation.” (more…)
by editor | Jun 12, 2009 | Gardening, Farming, Food, & Permaculture
Many people think only of allergies when they hear the word pollen. But pollination — the transfer of pollen grains to fertilize the seed-producing ovaries of flowers — is an essential part of a healthy ecosystem. Pollinators play a significant role in the production of over 150 food crops in the United States — among them apples, alfalfa, almonds, blueberries, cranberries, kiwis, melons, pears, plums, and squash.
Bees, both managed honey bees and native bees, are the primary pollinators. However, more than 100,000 invertebrate species, including bees, moths, butterflies, beetles, and flies, serve as pollinators — as well as 1,035 species of vertebrates, including birds, mammals, and reptiles. In the United States, the annual benefit of managed honey bees to consumers is estimated at $14.6 billion. The services provided by native pollinators further contribute to the productivity of crops as well as to the survival and reproduction of many native plants.
However, long-term population trends for some North American pollinators are “demonstrably downward,” says a new report from the National Research Council1.
Observable decreases in wild populations of bees, butterflies, and moths are of great concern to producers of fruits, vegetables, nuts, alfalfa, and flowers. These crops depend on wild and domestic pollinators. Growers in California, Florida, Arizona, Utah, Washington, and Hawaii are especially concerned. More important is the disturbing notion of an imbalance in the natural ecosystem and biodiversity on which all food production depends. Habitat loss for pollinators by human activity poses an immediate and frequently irreversible threat. Other factors responsible for population decreases include invasive plant species, broad-spectrum pesticide use, disease, and weather.
For the most part, the general public is unaware of the decrease in pollinator populations and the implications this has for agricultural production. The Nature’s Partners: Pollinators, Plants, and You curriculum is designed to educate young people about
- pollinators and the important role they play in providing many of the foods we eat and the plant fiber used in our clothing and household goods, and
- ways they can help pollinators survive and flourish by protecting and creating pollinator-friendly habitat.
The Nature’s Partners curriculum is just one step toward increasing the public’s awareness and sense of responsibility that are essential to a successful conservation program for pollinators.
Go to curriculum
by editor | Jun 9, 2009 | Conservation & Sustainability
by Rex Ettlin
Education Program Coordinator
Oregon Zoo
First I have to tip my hat in apology to aquariums, wildlife parks and educational farms. Since I work in a zoo that’s what I can talk about. But the idea of a zoo as an effective educational tool applies equally well to all non-formal educational settings, such as art museums, science museums, nature parks or natural areas. Teachers who have access to any of these should definitely include them in their toolbox.
A zoo’s paramount purpose is to promote wildlife conservation. A zoo exists to educate. Research happens, recreation happens, but above all is the intent to educate. The educational potential is at its greatest with a professional educator designing a learning activity to use at the zoo. The zoo is a great tool and it’s at its best when a real artisan is using it, a classroom teacher who has designed focused activities connected to a long-term curriculum.
(more…)
by editor | Apr 21, 2009 | K-12 Classroom Resources, Place-based Education
By Shamu Fenyvesi Sadeh
Portland State University, Center for Learning and Teaching West (NSF)
If students were asked to define “environment” and “community” what would they come up with? What would it look like if students designed their own methods for investigating community environmental issues? What would it mean if the teacher encouraged students to make connections between what they know about their neighborhood and scientific concepts such as diesel particulate pollution and carcinogens?
These are the central questions guiding a collaborative research and teaching project between an eighth-grade science teacher in a Northeast Portland middle school and myself, a long-time environmental educator turned doctoral student.
Our goal is to empower students to make connections between personal knowledge and environmental learning in ways that promote participation and learning in science class. To be responsive to the students’ interests and to facilitate our own continual learning, we use the model of action research – a spiral process of planning, implementation, evaluation and re-planning. The general approach of our plan-as-we-go curriculum is to get students involved in learning about and acting on community environmental issues of their choosing.
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Community-based or place-based programs share our emphasis on the local context but few programs that we have read or heard about turn power in the classroom over to the students. In my first years of teaching environmental education I spent a lot of energy trying to get the students to understand and adopt my (enlightened) environmental perspective and absorb my (considerable) scientific expertise. Historically much of the environmental education curriculum and research does the same: it focuses on either 1) carefully planned and tested activities designed to encourage the adoption of environmentally friendly behaviors that are pre-determined by the teachers and researchers, or 2) packaged units on environmental knowledge designed to be easily fed to the cooperative (but passive) student.
It was working with Native American, poor European American and African American students that helped me to shift towards student-centered learning. Approaching urban and minority students with my standard nature-as-wilderness bag of tricks was simply not working. Slowly, I began to do more listening than talking and to adapt my teaching to the particular needs and interests of the students and their communities. Now I know that to make environmental and scientific fields more diverse and to teach effectively to underserved populations I have to drop my agenda and listen to theirs. Particularly for populations such as urban, low-income African American and Latino students, who historically have not had a voice in scientific and environmental fields, honoring student knowledge and empowering student decision-making in the curriculum is crucial.
The Community Environmental Health Project at Columbia Middle School
In our work with low-income African American, Latino, Asian and European American middle school students, the collaborating teacher and I have worked hard to put the students’ perspectives at the center of the classroom. For example, when we began this fall by asking students about environmental issues in their community we got a lot of confused looks and blank stares. We decided we needed to take a few steps back and have the students define the concepts we were using. We decided to start using the words like “neighborhood”, “community” and “health”, rather than just “environment”, because we found that those words made sense to the students.
The discussion on “What is Community to You” was one of several that delved into students’ intense curiosity about race and poverty. Why is it as one student, Devon, observed “On this block we got Mexicans, on this block white, on this block white.” Why is the majority of industry located in minority neighborhoods? These were some of the liveliest conversations we have had in class this year. Few off-the-shelf environmental education curricula, even community-based programs, address race or class. Yet we found that culture, race and class are central to the students’ experience of community issues and are, of course, central elements in the field of environmental justice.
As a way of generating excitement on an issue close to the student’s experience, we read an article on the building that housed our school just four years ago. Many students in the class had older brothers and sisters, cousins or even parents who had attended school in the old building. The article describes how the building was contaminated with high levels of radon and toxic mold for many years. However, most shocking were three facts in the article: 1) radon exposure causes severe headaches and a lowering of cognitive abilities, 2) students at this school had the lowest test scores and among the lowest attendance rates in the entire state, and 3) some school officials knew for many years about the radon contamination and did nothing, despite repeated complaints by students, parents and teachers.
Many of the students were shocked and some, angry. One student, Sara, wrote in response to the article “If they knew about it for so long, how come they didn’t tell nobody or do anything?” The article showed students that there are important environmental issues affecting their community, introduced the concept of environmental justice, and in the words of the teacher, “got them riled up!”
After helping students to find their homes on city maps, we decided to engage in some neighborhood investigations at a scale that makes sense to the students: three block surrounding their house, apartment or trailer. From their observations, and from surveys the students designed and conducted in their neighborhoods, we generated a list of community issues. Homelessness, violence and graffiti were frequently raised together with more traditional environmental justice issues such as air pollution and asthma. Each class of students voted on an issue to investigate further and to take action on. Three classes chose air pollution and asthma and one class chose homelessness. Although homelessness and graffiti do not appear in scientific accounts of environmental problems, nor are they topics usually studied in science class, we decided to include them on the “community issues ballot” because they reflect student and community interest. If we want a science and environmental education that reflects the full diversity of our society, than we must expand the boundaries of “science” and “the environment.”
Other activities we have done as part of the community environmental health project include: writing a scientific autobiography, conducting community surveys, dialoguing with guest speakers, taking field trips, watching a video on pollution issues in a San Francisco neighborhood made by middle school students, conducting a lichen (as air quality indicators) survey, and making presentations to 6th and 2nd graders.
Challenges
Accomodating the time demands of this way of teaching and learning is not easy. Since the students design their own assignments and choose projects to work on, the teacher and I cannot plan the curriculum in advance. Additionally, our community investigations involve lots of reading and group work that demand lots of class time and need to be balanced with other 8th grade science units. Moving from teaching as telling to teaching as finding out requires a huge shift in thinking that posed a challenge to both the teacher and myself. This shift involves letting go of control and expertise and leaving room for mistakes and uncertainty. From my experience in environmental and science education, it is the path that all of us, whether college professors, nature center naturalists, or middle school teachers need to take.
A Little of What Have We Learned
Although we are still deep in data analysis, evaluation and reflection, a few patterns and lessons have emerged from the last year.
The Community Environmental Health Project is seen by some students as exciting and “real” compared to the usual school work of “sit and listen”, “facts” and “books”.
Many students who were typically unmotivated by science class emerged as energetic and vocal participants in the community environmental health project.
Many students were able to make personal connections to science through observations they made in their daily lives, conversations with neighbors and family, concerns about justice, and feelings of compassion for those suffering from asthma, cancer, lead poisoning, or homelessness.
Students showed understanding of concepts such as: the health effects of environmental toxins, using lichen as air quality indicators, environmental justice, mapping, community activist resources, and the effects of personal choices on environmental health.
Students’ comments and participation in extracurricular activities related to the project (producing a youth radio show for local community radio) demonstrate the empowerment many students feel being part of the project.
When a normally shy student proclaims “I want to know what it is like to be a homeless person,” and another confides to me that she likes studying air pollution because “my friend has asthma and I can cure her,” and a third tells me “So now that I see these things around me, all this air pollution, I know what to name it cause before I didn’t really pay attention to it,” we feel good about the work we have done.
(Names of the school and students have been changed)
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