Wachstumshormone

Oct

22

How livable is your neighborhood?

Filed Under Programs | 2 Comments

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Students Use Real World Data to Make ‘Green Maps’ of their Community

by Todd Burley
Homewaters Project, Seattle

“Green Mapping connected Cleveland’s students to their community by opening up their eyes to the environmental benefits and detriments around them. It gave the students a sense of ownership, pride, and responsibility. The culminating presentation at City Hall was the icing on the cake–students were able to share their voice with students from other schools and show what they found from their research.”
Amy Baeder, 10th Grade Teacher, Cleveland High School

How can we bring the titanic issues of community health – both environmental and social – down to a level that can be taught in the classroom?  How can we make pollution immediate, income disparity tangible, and historical landscape changes apparent to the average tenth grade student?  And how can we show the connections among all these issues including the students themselves?

Ten years ago, the seed of an answer to these questions germinated in New York’s Green Map System.  This nonprofit organization facilitates the creation of ‘green maps’ around the world that make visual the sustainable features – and problems – in a local community.  Green maps are locally created, but use an international set of icons as a shared language.
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Sep

11

A Forest by the Children, for the Children

Filed Under Perspectives, Place-based Education, Programs | Leave a Comment

By Kristen Cook

This year I learned that EarthCorps
don’t only make the forest a better
place, they teach other people how
to take care of the forest and some
of those people are us.
— Joseph, 5th grader

As the youth outreach coordinator for Earth Corps, a Seattle-based conservation corps, I provide in-depth service learning projects for youth using habitat restoration as the context. For the past six years, I have been working with teachers and students from Dearborn Park elementary in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood.

This area of southeast Seattle is away from the wealthier waterfront neighborhoods and properties which look out over the city skyline and Puget Sound. This is an area of the city whose parks and small bits of forest have historically been overlooked, not unlike its residents, many of whom are, to use the current terminology, “underserved.” Within this urban ecosystem, you’ll find ethnicities and languages spanning the globe, and if you drive down from Beacon Hill, or up from Rainier Valley, you’ll come across a tiny gem of a forest, not quite three acres in all. This is the Dearborn Park Children’s Forest.

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Aug

17

Place-Based Education: Learning to Be Where We Are

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Gregory A. Smith

ONE OF THE PRIMARY STRENGTHS of place-based education is that it can adapt to the unique characteristics of particular places, and in this way it can help overcome the disjuncture between school and children’s lives that is found in too many classrooms, Mr. Smith points out.

LAST SUMMER I spent a morning with eight or nine high school students who were members of an Upward Bound program based at Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon. The students were working in the Neawanna Estuary in Seaside, about 22 miles to the south. The efforts of students before them had contributed much of the data used in a successfully funded urban renewal grant proposal aimed at transforming a set of abandoned mill ponds into a park and nature center. The job of the Upward Bound students for the preceding few weeks had been to tag and then locate with global positioning technology woody debris that makes good salmon habitat. Students from Seaside schools were mapping habitat for birds and other wildlife in a similar fashion. All this information would be channeled to the groups responsible for determining how this land could best be developed to support its wildlife populations and to provide local residents and tourists with a deeper understanding of what it takes to preserve and restore healthy ecosystems.

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GREGORY A. SMITH is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Ore.

Aug

17

Grades K-8: Watersheds

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Crumple Your Own Watershed

by Erica Ritter

Make your own three-dimensional map, and use it to explore how flowing water defines the areas of land we call “watersheds.”  This activity provides opportunities for creativity and for meaningful discussion, a great combination for engaging students.
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Aug

9

Review: Getting to Know Tarantulas

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Book reviews by Patricia Richwine, Ph.D.

harrytarantulaAn Interview with Harry the Tarantula
Author:  Leigh Ann Tyson (2003)
Illustrator:  Henrik Drescher
Publisher:  National Geographic
32 pages
ISBN 0-7922-5122-9

Katy Did, the talk-show host on KBUG radio, does an “up close and personal” interview with Harry the Tarantula in this picture book which might be classified as faction, a combination of fact and fiction.  In question and answer format, the habits and behaviors of tarantula spiders are presented.  Read more

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