August 13th, 2009
Photo from a post titled "Occupational Hazards"
The Infinite Universe Blog is an engaging and witty site authored by local naturalist and photographer Tim Boyle.
I highly recommend scrolling down and checking out the sidebar section titled “Things kids say to a naturalist…”
June 23rd, 2009
Black Crappie Image From the Leader's Guide
I finally got a chance to take an indepth look at MinnAqua’s Leader’s Guide.
I knew it would be good because it won a 2008 NAI Interpretive Media Award, but it far exceeded my expectations. I anticipated a curriculum guide much like the Project WET and WILD guides – which are great resources. However, the MinnAqua Guide builds on the template in a couple major ways.
First, each chapter contains an impressive quantity of local aquatic natural history, essentially eliminating the need to seek out other sources to build your knowledge or to tweak activities to be locally applicable. The guide is alone worth reading to simply increase your natural history knowledge.
Second, the guide also comes with a CD containing a plethora of seriously impressive images, especially of fish. No simple line drawings here, think detailed full-color images that look like the fish jumped out of the water onto your page.
The guide also includes hyper-detailed evaluations of how each lesson meets Minnesota’s Academic Standards and ready-to-use assessment quizzes and standards. To top it all off, the entire guide was reviewed by over 100 experts in various fields so you can feel ultra-confident about the accuracy of the content.
You can get a copy by attending or hosting a MinnAqua Educator Workshop. Contact Michelle Kelly for more info.
May 14th, 2009
Here is a video made by the Biology Class of Miss Baker:
Its really interesting to hear so many of the students say they would like to have people with science careers come into the classroom and talk to them about it. It seems like a no-brainer, but we are not doing it enough.
Miss Baker is a biology teacher who’s class has a blog, and who has her own blog about using blogs for science education. Very exciting and inspiring – she is meeting the students where they are and it is obviously engaging them.
I wonder if local nature centers could engage with schools by using blogs/facebook/twitter etc. Maybe they could even partners with a local biology class to set it up and run the blog for a school year, or get a summer intern. If any organizations are interested in this idea and would like some help setting it up, please contact me.
April 10th, 2009
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Department of Lands and Minerals publishes a really fantastic teacher’s guide on the Geology of Minnesota. You can request a free copy or download a Pdf.
Its just the right amount of information to give the reader a clear understanding of Minnesota’s geologic history; providing a comprehensive knowledge of the evidence for Minnesota’s major historical geological events while not getting bogged down in too much detail.
March 16th, 2009
Rock Cycle Journey Activity
5/09 UPDATE: I finally got the chance to test out this game last week and it works beautifully! Of note, the sediment and sedimentary lines get long (all dice, except magma, lead to sediment – and sediment only leads to sedimentary) so leave some extra space by those two dice. Some great follow-up questions include: Are all the dice the same? Why is there an animal station in a rock cycle game? Does anyone have many of the same color beads in a row – do rocks change fast or slow?
After going through the ProjectWet training a couple weeks ago I was inspired to make a rock cycle version of the popular Incredible Journey activity.
The rock cycle version has six dice: Igneous, Metamorphic, Sedimentary, Sediment, Magma, and Animal. Igneous, Metamorphic, and Sedimentary are, of course, the the three types of rocks. Sediment and Magma are transition types – sediment leads to sedimentary and magma leads to igneous. The animal die was included to demonstrate that life interacts with rocks, a snail was chosen because snail-like shells can frequently be seen fossilized in local sedimentary rocks.
Here a link to a pdf of this Rock Cycle activity with the instructions and graphics. If you use it let me know what you think!
March 9th, 2009
If you haven’t recently (or ever) gone through the Project Wet, Wild, and Learning Tree training I highly recommend taking them again!
I had the opportunity to go through the training, for the third time, last week at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (which is such a cool place it deserves a post of its own) and I was happily surprised at the upgrades and additions to the programs.
New (since about three years ago went I last attended a training) is a Early Childhood supplement for Project Wild, an awesome Project Wild Aquatic book, a phenomenal time-saving book with Minnesota versions of Project Wild activities, and a newly revised Project Learning Tree guide. They have also recently added a plethora of online components.
Also, as always, the opportunity to meet new people is priceless.
If you want to attend, check out the calendar and sign up! If you have a big group you can contact the Project coordinators and see if you can arrange a private training.
February 26th, 2009
International Children's Digital Library
The International Children’s Digital Library is wonderful website full of great resources for educators, parents, and anyone who loves children’s literature and illustration.
There are many science and nature themed books with high-res scanned images of all of the pages, including the illustrations. And many of the book’s copyrights have expired so you can used the illustrations for programs. The organization has even developed a Teacher Training Manual.
“the mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to prepare children for life in an ethnically and culturally diverse world by building the world’s largest online multicultural repository of children’s literature.”
Image form the International Children's Digital Library
January 29th, 2009
Girl outside with bubbles
I had a great opportunity to discuss playing outdoors with 6th graders this week.
Through the Resource Teacher program I worked with a phenomenal language teacher at a middle school in Circle Pines, MN. The program gave students some historical knowledge of what it was like being a kid 50 – 150 years ago through short readings (linked below), gave them an opportunity to play outside – completely unstructured, and then gave them time to reflect, journal, and discuss their thoughts and experiences.
Most of the students said they spend a lot of time outdoors playing outside. However, they expressed a desire for more freedom with their playtime. About half the students said that they thought their parents had more fun as children because they needed to be more creative in their play; they didn’t have organized team sports and technology to create rules and entertain them.
They also cited too much homework as a time barrier to outdoor playtime. I thought this might be a clever ploy, but the teacher confirmed that the students do bear a large homework burden.
The three readings were from the introduction to The Last Child in the Woods, a story about an encounter with John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt’s boyhood journal.
January 22nd, 2009
Public domain image from grandmasgraphics.com
I think I may have found a great potential resource for environmental educators on BoingBoing today: A website called Grandma’s Graphics is full of free public domain images which I think are pulled from old children’s books.
BUT there have been so many people visiting, and trying to visit, Grandma’s Graphics who saw it on BoingBoing that it broke the website. I’m sure it will be fixed shortly, and then we can see if this a treasure cove of images or a dud.
January 19th, 2009
Digital Youth Research
I’ve recently come across some great research and information about the way teenagers use the internet and social networking. I just started reading it all, but I think this research can provide insight about how to achieve our organizations’ missions by better utilizing new media and social networking. While the studies focus on teenagers, people of all ages – especially young adults – are plugged-in.
The Digital Youth Project: (here is a nice overview via boingboing)
“Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives.
Taken Out of Context
American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics
(doctorial dissertation by Dr. danah michele boyd)
From the Introduction:
“While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself. “