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This summer ERC offered eight successful Wild Lunch programs with the Hunger Coalition lunches at Woodside Elementary. It was wonderful to interact with the community and to share exciting nature-related activities with students of all ages!
Themes included trees, night flyers, geology, dinosaurs, senses, predators, fish, and properties of water. Returning and new students each week got involved building bird nests like those that owls would find, mining for fossil chocolate chips in cookie rocks to simulate being paleontologists, exploring mystery sense bins to use their sense of feel to describe objects, and competing to fit drops of water on pennies to learn about cohesion.
Through these and more hands-on activities students were able to discover science concepts while having fun after a delicious lunch! |
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This spring, Hailey Science After School (SAS!) students went where no other SAS! class had gone before. Over the course of eight weeks, twelve 4th and 5th grade students at Hailey Elementary researched, designed, and implemented a restoration project along the Wood River Land Trust's Draper Preserve in Hailey.
For the first couple of weeks, students explored and completed habitat assessments at the Draper Preserve to identify possible problems that we could base our restoration project around. Students determined that we should both clean up the area by picking up trash around the preserve and plant native shrubs and grasses around the WRLT's new informational shelter.
With help from the WRLT staff, students prepared the area for native grasses and shrubs by smoothing out the soil with a rake and spreading compost over it. We then planted a native grass seeds mix, generously provided by the WRLT, and did a small clean up of the general area.
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This winter, the ERC is offering SAS! (Science After School!) to Bellevue and Hemingway Elementary, and our new Wood River Middle School program: Winter Adventure Science School (WASS).
SAS! and WASS are FREE eight-week programs that allow students opportunities beyond the school day to participate in project-based learning, within the context of natural science, the environment, and sustainability issues. We are mindful of the BCSD curriculum standards for the grade levels, and work to incorporate these, as appropriate, into the curriculum. We build opportunities for the students to explore science through games, art, journaling, observation, exploration, service learning, and scientific research. We maintain at least an 8:1 student teacher ratio, allowing for more meaningful teamwork and individual attention. We provide snacks, journals, and other program supplies for each student to ensure that finances are not an obstacle in their participation. In addition to working with the students each week, we have created an online journal for parents where they can discover what their student is learning via stories and pictures. |
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 Science After School (SAS!) affords students the opportunity to grow as aspiring scientists and naturalists. Students learn more about our local flora and fauna, and in doing so, investigate the natural factors that make our community unique. Through relevant, engaging, hands-on activities, students’ interest and curiosity for the natural world increases. SAS! allows students to delve further into scientific topics that are initially introduced to them in the classroom, making the topics more tangible, building on the knowledge and skills they learn in school. Exploring relevant topics encourages students to become more active citizens by identifying environmental issues affecting the Wood River Valley today and thinking about potential solutions. Students also become further acquainted with scientific inquiry and use the scientific process to investigate some of the questions they had about their surrounding environment. After SAS!, students have a better appreciation for the scientific world and are eager to continue their exploration of our natural world. |
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Sarah Hirnyck, AmeriCorps Summer Programs Assistant As the summer sun slowly sinks behind the Smokey Mountains, thirty happy, chatty, s’more-filled campers and their counselors collect their sleeping bags, blankets, and warm clothes for the much anticipated meadow camp-out. We begin to prepare for the majestic night ahead while the Boulder Mountains gracefully loom above us in the twilight sky. As we settle in for the night, the only sound you hear> |
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Knowing Nature