Biodiversity and Outdoor Learning

by Mary Van Dyke, September 30, 2015

Today I take time to look at a beautiful Monarch butterfly “eclose”. The butterfly steps out of its chrysalis-shell, unfurls and begins to pump up its wings.

In the classroom, insects always have six legs, and yet I can see only four of the Monarch’s.

So I google “Monarch butterfly anatomy” and find out that the Monarch is from a class of butterflies that has four prominent legs and two residual ones tucked up by the thorax. I consider the adaptation and evolutionary pathway of these butterflies, as I watch the butterfly taking shelter from the rainstorm today, waiting until the weather warms up so it can set out to fly to Mexico for the winter.

I have been wondering too why I never see any fig flowers?

And yet there are fruits budding and ripening on the fig tree alongside where I find another Monarch chrysalis attached to the underside of a fig leaf.

I google my question about fig flowers. On Wikipedia I discover I have 10,000 years of history of the cultivation of figs to catch up. I learn about the intricate relationships of the fig’s internal flower structure and the plant’s symbiosis with pollinators: the fig-specialist male and female wasps.

Outdoors, I discover more variety and more interesting patterns than the examples I am often invited to consider in classrooms indoors. In the "real-world" I have lots of questions to ask, and my predictions are not always correct. This is the power of “authentic learning” that happens when students and teachers observe, ask questions and learn together.

Next week, I am taking several groups of students outside to learn about sunflowers, leaves, and water issues. We will be observing: building awareness and appreciation, while taking time to discover and discuss patterns, ecology, communities and interrelationships between plants, people and other animals and biodiversity. We will cover standards of learning at the same time.

Going outside supports our need for biophilia: simply our love of life!

As E.O. Wilson points out in this week’s Washington Post interview, research now confirms the imperative that with increasing urbanization, we all need to go outside more (not less) to appreciate and learn about the diversity of life around us.

Resources

• Monarch butterfly anatomy http://monarchwatch.org/biology/index.htm
• The Common Fig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_fig
• E.O. Wilson explains why parks and nature are really good for your brain by Chris Mooney, September 30, 2015, Washington Post

Integrated Learning and Teaching in the Moment: Outdoors at Abingdon Elementary School

by Mary Van Dyke

Thanks very much to Abingdon Elementary School’s 3rd Grade Teacher, Mark Fox and Jordan Kivitz, Science Lab Teacher for hosting this month’s APS School Garden Meetup hour.

Mark and Jordan share a brief history of their school garden, tips on their integrative teaching approach and garden maintenance, and some salient stories. Mark has been at Abingdon Elementary School a couple of years now and this is Jordan’s first year at the school and they are working together to bring experiential learning experiences to the children. A month ago, a teacher and class looked out of their window and saw a fox walking in the woods near the school. The fox then caught a rabbit right in front of the class’s eyes. Mark also found a family of bunnies in the garden. Such a direct and memorable experience for a class can be easily tied by a skilled teacher to the relevant grade-level curriculum for the students: in this case food webs, lifecycles, habitats, urban ecology and more.

Jordan takes K- 5 students out as often as he can to learn to the Outdoor Science Lab - aka The Garden.

At this point 4th grade have committed to VA Studies and have not participated, but at other APS schools, 4th graders do go outdoors to learn. There’s a wide variety of programs for outdoor learning at each of the elementary schools within APS and during the Meetup we share these differences and our commonalities. Jordan studied integrative learning at college, and now designs curriculum-linked experiential lessons for outdoors: including weather, soil, plant and animal habitat and lifecycle studies.

The Garden is fenced, there is some water and a shed nearby, and there is a big covered composting bin.  

 

Plenty of rabbits live in the area. The Garden is formally laid out. Within the picket fence, there is a series of large raised beds to each side, a center aisle and a gathering space near the entrance.

Teachers have adopted some of the raised bed plots. Teachers are using QR codes to link to the Abingdon Garden website with info on each of the beds. One teacher has a successful pollinator garden with herbs and flowers.

Another teacher is growing an ornamental cabbage garden.
Mark mentioned that the students love the Bok Choy they grow too!

Other plots were planted in the fall with tulips and spring bulbs.

Students are measuring rainfall and observing the weather outdoors.

We talk about vegetables to plant in the spring that cycle with the school year: what will grow best in the shadier beds, what will thrive in the sun? One early spring crop to grow could be potatoes, another could be kale? Mark tells a story about 200 cabbage plants arriving as a gift, and how they got bugs!  That was another memorable teaching moment.

One challenge is enabling more classroom teachers to feel comfortable and competent teaching outside. Teachers are often concerned that the maintenance will be too much for them if they take on a bed

Help is much appreciated from parents and community. Mark as 3rd Grade Teacher takes out his students and also helps with coordinating garden maintenance and reclaimed the garden when he first arrived. This year he organized the very successful community clean-up their Green Apple Day of Service, that was filmed by Green Scene (and highlights service days at Abingdon, Discovery and Jamestown ES).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvKirA0n4Ak

Custodians are now set to help Mark with mowing of the grass in the garden. We talk about techniques such as sowing cover crops to improve soil condition, or layering beds with newspaper and mulch to reduce weeds while waiting to plant crops.

The Abingdon Garden will be moved in upcoming renovations of the school. Mark and Jordan are optimistic about the relocation of the Garden and opportunities to further develop the Garden and their teaching program on a new site. Although it will be a big transition, it’s also a chance to redesign the garden, focus on their community, the students and what the current needs are, and to perhaps with some funding to add some more supporting infrastructure, irrigation and other features.

We discuss year-round outdoor learning curriculum and how to more share between us all?

Perhaps anyone interested could meet up informally during the summer and share pacing and grade-level projects and lesson ideas?

Thanks again to Mark Fox and Jordan Kivitz for hosting this month's APS Garden Meetup, an initiative of the APS Superintendent's Advisory Committee on Sustainability.

Please join us for the next APS Garden Meetups:

January 11, 4 - 5 PM
Special discussion on energy activities for schools in partnership with the Superintendent's Advisory Committee on Sustainability and the Arlington School's Green Action Award, host Elenor Hodges, ACE. Place to be confirmed.

February 8 , 4 - 5 PM at Tuckahoe ES
Come network and share activities for wintry days with Margaret Egan, STEAM Teacher and Tuckahoe PTA representative Andrea Kaplowitz.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Ephemeral Nature-Based Art

By Mary Van Dyke

Andy Goldsworthy, the British sculptor and photographer, is famous for his meditative focus on the ephemeral in nature-based art. Think photos capturing instants in a process: melting snow circles in arctic light; leaves in spectral colors placed in a streamflow; rocks balancing.

Andy Goldsworthy

Nature-based art is a great fall activity for school students of all ages, embracing change, decay, creativity and the delight of being “in the flow”! Here are examples of Backyard Art inspired by Goldsworthy, arranged and photographed on iPads by 3rd and 4th Graders at Jamestown Elementary School, in a project taught by art teacher, Mary Gaynor.

Backyard Art by 3rd and 4th grade students at Jamestown Elementary School
inspired by Andy Goldsworthy
Project facilitated by art teacher Mary Gaynor

NOVA Outside, Northern Virginia’s regional alliance of environmental educators, recently hosted a workshop with Amy Perlman Gura, artist, teacher and parent who "strives to integrate her passions for the creative processes of art and nature." The result was an afternoon of teamwork creating ephemeral collaborative art and some very inspired Early Childhood Educators.

Photo by Peggy Ashbrook
http://nstacommunities.org/blog/category/earlyyears/

Voices from the Land (Voices) has created a school-based industry on creating poetry and art books and hosts teacher workshops integrating language and the landscape, art and culture. Inspiration comes from Andy Goldsworthy and a growing tradition of eco-art.

Find out more at the Voices website http://www.sharingvoices.org/ and collate your students visual and language arts into a poster, calendar or a album book as a more permanent record. If you’d like to know more - you can sign up for a Voices workshop near you or in a place you’d like to visit. This year Voices held a workshop in Ireland.

Voices from the Land Album from the Readingzone Blog

Voices from the Land, 2011, 2012
by Second Graders at Daniels Run Elementary School, Fairfax VA
Displayed at NoVA Outside's School Environmental Action Showcase
April 9, 2015
Photo by Mary Van Dyke

Next time you’re outside, collect and arrange some pinecones, acorns, sticks, leaves, flowers, stones and pebbles - and access your own creativity - even for a moment! Just go outside and do it! As Goldsworthy says, "A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it."

Mary Van Dyke is Visiting Horticulturalist at Jamestown Elementary School and serves on the Advisory Committee of NoVA Outside, a regional alliance of environmental educators in Northern Virginia.

Resources

Amy Perlman Gura

• http://ameart.com/

Andy Goldsworthy

• Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Goldsworthy
• Photo of early work retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/articles/2005/05/04/andy_goldsworthy_feature.shtml

NoVA Outside - a regional alliance of environmental educators in Northern Virginia

• www.novaoutside.org

NSTA Early Childhood Blog

• http://nstacommunities.org/blog/category/earlyyears/

Voices from the Land (Voices)

• See http://www.sharingvoices.org/
• Example of Voices Album at the Readingzone blog https://thereadingzone.wordpress.com/tag/andy-goldsworthy/ and https://thereadingzone.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/voices-from-the-land-workshop/

Green STEM Ed: Learning and Teaching

Reposting of Green STEM: STEM as It's Meant to Be by Laura Arndt and Anne Tweed

"Roland Quitugua, a leading scientist in the U.S. territory of Guam, stood before a room of 60 public school teachers, describing his tireless efforts to eradicate a devastating problem on the tiny island in the Western Pacific: the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle....

See full article at http://ow.ly/U0UbR

Reposting from: http://www.advanc-ed.org/source/green-stem-stem-its-meant-be

Green Apple Day of Service - at Jamestown Elementary School

Green Apple Day of Service

Today is a beautiful crisp fall morning for our Green Apple Day of Service at Jamestown Elementary School!

Green Apple Day of Service is an initiative run by the Center for Green Schools at the US Green Building Council to help promote service learning in schools here in the US and around the world. Green Apple Day of Service - like Earth Day is on a specific day - but you can schedule your event to suit your community. The Green Apple website has plenty of how-to’s on organizing service events: flyer templates, web advertising, media toolkits, email signatures and yes, merchandizing too. We use the website and flyer to advertise our event - as a native plant habitat restoration in the front entrance area of the school. I look at the checklist to make sure our event planning is on track.

Downloadable Resources from greenapple.org
include banners, badges, email signatures

Landscape issues

There’s already some native and ornamental plants in Jamestown’s front entrance garden - but I notice there are also lots of fast growing weeds and many large areas of bare brown mulch. First, we identify the weeds. Alan digs some weed samples up - roots and all - and we identify and label them: dandelion, crabgrass and mugwort.

• Dandelions grow deep and need to be dug out.
• Crabgrass spreads by rhizomes, underground stem
• Mugwort re-grows from tiny parts of broken underground stem

Why are these weeds thriving in this garden area? We dig deeper into the mulch.

Tom finds the crabgrass roots are layered like a cake and are over a foot deep!  Yu-hsin and Wendy find a tangled network of bindweed roots under the top layer of mulch. 

What’s happening? Once or twice a year, this garden bed is weed-whacked and mulched over by a maintenance crew. The intentions are admirable, and the routine of weed-whacking and over-mulching is the norm for maintenance crews here. But this ground maintenance method actually worsens our weed problem. Only 8 weeks after being mown to the ground and mulched by the crew the weeds are back in force. The crabgrass, mugwort and the bindweed all re-grow new plants and sprout easily from the tiny parts of broken underground stems. These weeds grow a new mat of roots up into the new layer of mulch and then sprout up above ground.  The weeds outcompete the ornamental and native plants we are trying to cultivate.  

Mugwort

Plant Native Plants to Enhance Biodiversity

With 30 or so people here today we accomplish a lot of work and have time to play. We plant native plants that are not yet in the schoolyard that will help increase the biodiversity in this garden area.

Watering newly planted Fothergilla

Planting Aster

I select the native plants from Plant NOVA Natives to be tolerant of the extreme conditions in our school garden and for beauty in the fall and spring as well as summer.  We also plant purple and yellow pansies for instant effect and beauty. Some plants I bought at a market, most are donated native seedlings. Let’s hope these new plants will take root, and we and our native wildlife can enjoy their flowers and foliage over the next year or two.

Visit PlantNOVANatives.org for more information

Conversations and Community in Action

We chat while we work: this is community politics in action and at the heart of service learning and sustainability. We talk about longer term needs. Should we consider alternative management practices?  If weed whacking and mulching doesn’t work - what will?  How do we lessen the “weed bank”?

Options we bandy around include:

• annual “weed-whacking and mulch” maintenance with the landscape crew as usual, augmented by another Green Apple Day, or
• apply chemical weed-killers, or
• mechanically remove the entire soil structure and redesign the whole front area to include a playground, or
• pave over this entire area too if the school is ever rebuilt
  

These are only some of the options to consider: each comes with environmental and social pros and cons and issues. For example, we need to remember that chemical weed-killers are not allowed on school grounds. Inevitably each option comes with a price tag. While we work today we are visited by John, videographer from Arlington Public Schools Green Scene. John interviews many of the people here today about the event. Here is the link to his Green Scene film compiling three schools Green Apple Days of Service - including Jamestown's. I enjoy chatting and meeting people too, and I come away with many impressions, including a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe for eating dandelions with bacon dressing.

Planting Rudbeckia - Black-eyed Susan

Collective Impact and Green Apple Days

Several people tell me they enjoy the morning, and ask me if we could arrange more outdoor Green Apple Days over the year. To me that’s a sure sign of success. Although this garden area at the front entrance of the school needs ongoing maintenance, we have to consider what other projects could use collective attention and time. There are plenty of other places in the schoolyard for service projects and that might attract community to join in. Maybe at our next Green Apple Day of Service we could pull invasive vines off the trees and shrubs in our wood area near the school?  Or we could beautify the native plantings on the other side of the school or we could look after the vegetable patch? All of these jobs can be done easily by groups. Together we can accomplish far more than any one of us could do alone - and we help our school look beautiful, be a more healthy community and we learn while we work. This is collective impact, and service learning and a reason to have another Green Apple Day!

Thank you!

With thanks to many for enabling our first Jamestown Green Apple Day of Service including:

Alan, Anisa, Barbara, Bethany, Carl, Chris, Clementina,  David, Elizabeth, Eric, Jason, Jade, Jenn, Jerome, John, Jose, Kenwyn, Phil, Susan, Tom, Wendy, William, Yu-hsin, the Navigators families and all the Jamestown community families helping today!

Resource Links

Arlington Public Schools Green Scene

Arlington Regional Master Naturalists

Green Apple Day of Service

Green Apple Day of Service - resources

Center for Green Schools

Green Scene video Green Apple Days of Service at Jamestown, Abingdon and Discovery ES
Jamestown Elementary School

Jamestown Elementary School PTA

Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia

Navigators USA

Plant NOVA Natives

US Green Building Council

Virginia Cooperative Extension

Virginia Native Plant Society

Weed Identification for Schools

Article by Mary Van Dyke
Mary Van Dyke is Visiting Horticulturalist at Jamestown Elementary School, Arlington, VA, where she facilitates outdoor learning and the outdoor classrooms. Mary was recently recognized by The Center for Green Schools with their Good Apple award for her work promoting healthy, safe and sustainable learning environments.