Category — Wetland Learners

In July, Lawrence teachers took part in a workshop designed to strengthen teachers’ ability to use fine arts to teach science.  Wetland Learners Coordinators Sandy Sanders and Alison Reber took teachers on a virtual field trip to the Wakarusa River Valley including wetlands and pollinator ties to Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Science, Art and the Environment In this session we’ll take a virtual field trip to local wetland areas and explore ecological concepts that have a strong cross-disciplinary reach.  Session participants will get an overview of the Wakarusa Wetland Learners Project, wetland functions, and the relationship between wetlands and pollinators.   portion of the session will focus on hands-on activities with easily obtained native plants and insects.  (Ties to the Lied School Performance of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other Etic Carle Favorites.)

For props we used a large satellite map of the Wakarusa River Valley, live plant specimens, a variety of preserved pollinators, and live aquatic animals.   We also had a collection of photographs of the wetlands.

Sping’s finally here!  I’ve got the doors to the office open and giant dust bunnies are blowing off the ceiling fan.   That explains my sinus headache….

We had a wonderful wetland event yesterday and the pictures are already up on flickr.  I’m working on getting our facilitators more appropriately acknowledged.  Check ‘em out.

Last week’s poetry reading was awesome - many thanks to Stephanie Barrows with the Lawrence Poetry Community for the hours and hours she’s spent coordinating the Spring Poetry Series.

That’s the short & sweet for now.  The calendar has info about wetland learners events that are coming up.

Wednesday Twitter-ish

Site visit to Baker Wetland, the rails-to-trails stormwater retention wetland, and Edgewood Park (not a wetland but some darn pretty soil with a stream and a grove of trees). Lots of turtles, frogs, birds, ducks, & every one of them has an attitude right now!

Wetland Wednesdays -Alison Reber

With help from the Roger Hill Volunteer Center and the Youth Volunteer Council, students enrolled in the CJHS EDGE Program have spent the last 2 Wednesdays working on wetland projects.

Last week they helped finish about 125 Wetland Learners booklets. It was slow going but we had a wonderful time visiting about the life of a junior high student. They had a good time relaying the Art for the Sky / Regal fritillary project experience.

Also, my daughter Tabitha came along to get a smidge-a-bit of the Central experience. One of the students, Sam, gave us a grand tour of my old alma mater. I’m not sure if she believed me when I said my sister, my mother and both my grandmothers had also gone to school there. (I’m only a little heart-sick that Tabby’s hell-bent on going to West where her Daddy and Uncle Rich and my father - her grandfather went to school.)

Yesterday we first went to Baker Wetland to walk through the boardwalk so they could get the feel for what the Wetland Learners would do with the booklets. Then, surprise of surprises! We got to where Rex usually does his macroinvertebrate gig and Sam goes: “I came out here with my class last year and there was this guy in the water and we had to get in and find BUGS!” I prompted, “Like what?” and she said “Like frogs and tadpoles, and beetles and stuff…” A little sketchy but we’ll take it - Congratulations - our first documented Wetland Learners play-it-forward peer-to-peer teaching. I so love it when that happens. sigh.

Next we went over to the stormwater retention area south of Douglas County Works east of Haskell University, adjacent to the Rails to Trails trail. We trekked down to the wetland area and up the berm so we could look down and across the basin (sometimes 2-dimensional words are too pale for this 3-dimensional world). The kids were surprised because it’s not like anybody guess there’s a squiggly channel of water on the other side of what appears to be a mound of mud with some tree seedlings here and there. However, it wasn’t the frogs, or the turtles, ducks, mud, etc… that really grabbed their attention. It was the cows. Just beyond the retention area, there was a pasture with a handful of cows grubbing down on what looked like absolutely divine grass. The stormy sky was undercut by late afternoon sunlight; the grass looked like cake icing green.

We walked a bit farther down the trail so I could show them the backside of a new building/walled parking area - something… The important thing was to show them the water leaving the wetland area becomes a stream but then dwindles back to a wetland and then merges with another drainage ditch to be a stream again, etc… Wetlands and streams aren’t mutally exclusive. The other big thing was to point out the soil where the construction took place. Its a nasty yellow brown. Trash in streams is visually disturbing but the sediment in the stream is smothering. My mini-monologue was disrupted by a chorus frog jumping from said sediment filled puddle to another puddle. The possum footprint didn’t help my case either. I think they more or less got the dirt on dirt - it’s all dirt, baby! Soils age and change. That’s important because when we’re talking about wetland restoration and wetland construction the soils dictate everything.

The kids took some pictures - check them out over at flickr but be patient - I haven’t cleaned them up at all yet. Enjoy….

Odds & ends from the last few days… -Alison Reber

Friday 3/28/08 Bob and I attended KU’s Hall Center for Humanities Annual Oral History Workshop (Learning to Hear the Stories IX)

This year’s theme, “Beyond These Hallowed Halls—Educating America”, encourages us to take a critical look at the connection between our past and our future as we turn to projects in individual and group history that have had a significant impact upon our public memory. (sound familiar?…)

There were several old friends in the mix - Mike Watowa & Gloria Throne from the Kansas Folklore Society. Ruth Turney, Pat Kehde, and Burdett Loomis were also in the mix.

[Read more →]

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs004/1101274774513/archive/1101954710829.html

Bob Burkhart, Stephanie Barrows, and I have been collaborating on a project designed to spark ideas and conversation about personal relationships within the natural world and how they carry forth into the future.

Many of you know that this topic is especially fascinating for me.

From one side of the state to the other, 10 year olds to 90 year olds, I’ve guided group discussions about where people live and what they hope is different in the future. Generally speaking, people like where they live and they hope that in the future others will valued it more than they do now.

With Mudscapes thousands of young people have worked together as neighbors to plan out their ideal watershed. Not unsurprisingly they create something that mirrors what they see in the world around them. Urban, rural, good, bad, ugly…and equally fascinating.

Several years ago Bob and I began having indepth conversations about teaching approaches that spark collaborative learning. For me when that happens it’s like a moment in time freezes and I try to become invisible before the “students” suddenly realize they’re learning from each other without “teacher-directed curriculum bumpers”. Bob and I have been refining guided storytelling techniques that build shared visions of the future.
We met Stephanie through the Wetland Learners Project. She has a talent for tenacity, a passion for poetry, and a calm capacity to channel creative chaos. She also taught me a cool word — diachronical, which means changes that happen over time. Stephanie’s been wearing the letters off her keyboard trying to work out the details for this and several other poetry endeavors.

In mid-December we hosted a poetry reading at KVHA’s office. From there we decided to launch a spring series - recording the events with the hope of connecting the poetry with several of KVHA’s other projects.

Details about the events in this series are shown above. If all goes well, we plan to hold a special event in June to share and celebrate these new endeavors. -ALR

Schwegler Elem (Anna Busby)

School:

Teacher:

School: Woodlawn

Teacher:

School: Kennedy

Teacher: Sally Davis