"Our climate is changing at an alarming rate, and as a nation our young people are not prepared to provide the solutions necessary to mitigate and safeguard our world’s biodiversity, growing population, agricultural and transit systems and more. In a digital age, we are able to connect in new and innovative ways and collaborate and create like never before."
Click here for further details from the NWF on:
- the National Wildlife Federation's Green STEM Initiative
- the NWF Eco-Schools USA Program
- and the Next Generation Science Standards
From: http://blog.nwf.org/2013/04/green-stem-an-educational-collision-of-epic-proportion/
April 17, 2013, by Jennifer Hammond
I shared these changes with the afterschool kids, and they discussed seasonal changes they have seen. Due to time and daylight limitations, I brought nature indoors, sharing leaves that I found at home. (If time allows, I’d recommend you take students outside to look for leaves and other signs of fall. Wooded areas, school yards, parks, neighborhoods, even your own backyard are all great places to search.)
Although a leaf may appear to be one color, it actually contains pigments of multiple colors. In the summer, chlorophyll, the green pigment, dominates, concealing others. As chlorophyll breaks down in the fall, other pigments reveal themselves or form, turning the leaves yellow, orange, or red. I led the afterschool students through a chromatography experiment to identify what colors were hiding inside the leaves.
We successfully extracted red, yellow, and green pigments from the leaves! Because the color of each leaf is determined by a combination of the pigments inside, each paper strip had bands of colors in different sizes.
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