"Bee" the educator that you want to be!

One of the greatest parts of this experience has been learning about new subjects. One that I have found very interesting has been bees. The social structure, life history, and physical attributes of bees are all fascinating. My AmeriCorps partner Sheralynn updated our bee presentation and it has been very popular. We had a class from St. Mary's Catholic School come to the FLC and we got to teach them about bees. We have an awesome observation hive here with glass walls that we use to show kids the bees in action. I think a lot of permanent memories are made with this feature. One of the other things about this lesson is that it includes some physical activity which is always a good thing. Students perform a waggle dance and their hive mates have to figure out where they've stored the pollen. Smiles are always guaranteed.

One of my favorite pictures is this group running down the hill after finding the pollen.

Henry demonstrating a bee's adaptations!

We take kids to the bee garden and show them our 5 hives. They get to stand feet away from the hives and watch the bees go to work.

Fun with word clouds!

Just for fun I put my blog into a word cloud generator and displayed the 50 most common words that appeared so far. The results say a lot to me about which parts of my job are the most interesting. The words that come up the most often are the largest. I like what came up!

P.S. "queen" refers to our hive that swarmed, not the band!

A picture's worth a thousand words.

Not much to say here, I just thought it was a fun picture of one of my groups on a hike.

Earth Day Birthday

The Foothills Learning Center celebrated it's 10-year anniversary on Earth Day. We had live music, a great big cake, lots of visitors, and some over-sized lawn games. We stayed pretty late that day, but it was a nice, relaxing evening.

This is the design I made for the celebration cake. We have a giant dandelion sculpture in our parking lot that has become an icon of our facility.

This little girl picked up two sticks and started playing along with the band. Very cute!

Families are a frequent sight at the FLC. This giant Jenga was popular at the party.

The giant Jenga was feeling lonely so we added a comically large croquet set.

 

Earth Day Work Day

I got to help my friend Mackenzie out at the Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge for their Earth Day Work Day event. She is another AmeriCorps member and coordinates volunteers for DFNWR. I volunteered to help her for one of my service day requirements and it was a lot of hard work, but I met some neat people and we did some good for the DFNWR ecosystem.

My crew of 15 with their weapons of choice.

My crew was responsible for removing White Bryony and Poison Hemlock, two invasive species that cause harm to plants and animals. We cleared about a third of a mile of coastline in a few hours and pulled hundreds of plants.

Blake holding one of the larger Bryony roots we pulled that day.

The carnage of a former Bryony patch.

Some days are awesome!

There are cetain days that really click. I go home jumping up and down (literally) shouting about how much I love my job. This leaves my dogs rather confused.

Last week, I had one of those days. A group of 5th graders from a local charter school came for out Geology in the Foothills lesson. This is a 4-hour lesson plan that involves hiking, history, geomorphology, hydrology, erosion, weathering, the rock cycle, and so on. What made this group special was that the kids were super sharp and really funny. they caught on to new concepts quickly, and had a lot of unique interpretations of the geologic features we were looking at. They made a long, hot day really fun and tiring in a good way.

While walking along the edge of a pond, my group spotted some amazing bullfrogs!

Sometimes posing for a picture is fun!

The 3 R's

Who knew that the 3 R's stood for "Repeat, Repeat, Repeat"?

I've noticed that teachers seem to ask for certain lesson plans in waves. With the recent Earth Day event, our recycling lesson plan has been a huge hit. We have repeated the lesson at least a dozen times to hundreds of kids over the last few weeks. Some days you get two or three classes in a row at one school so your entire day consists of asking kids what they should do with their lunch packaging. This may sound boring to some, but it has a neat upside.

Sheralynn reading the story of the Earth Ghosts to 1st graders.

When you repeat a lesson over and over again, it no longer requires a great deal of concentration to lead the lesson. That frees up your mind to watch the kids. There are certain expressions that I am learning to recognize that tell me the student is confused, bored, engaged, or excited about the subject. With this info, I can tweak the presentation to keep students interested and engaged. In the long run, this will make me a better educator, so I look forward to repeating more lessons in the future. 

The recycle relay is the highlight of our recycling lesson. This part is super fun!

 

Lucy, we gotta lotta catching up to do!

WHEW! When I first started this, it was intended to be a weekly blog. Since a month has gone by, it is apparent that I am not meeting that goal. We have been busy, busy, busy here at the FLC. In fact, I only have 15 minutes to get this post going so let's get started.

Wilderness First Responder Training

The highlight of last month was the Wilderness First Responder Class I took from The Wilderness Medicine Training Center through Boise State University. The class had an on-line pre-lesson and a 50 hour practical session. We simulated disasters, learned CPR, and addressed diagnosing and treating major illness and injury in a back-country setting. It was intense work, but very gratifying. I already got to use my training when one of my students fell on a trail and hurt her knee. It was surprising to me how readily the skills snapped into place. Repetition works!

Stabilizing the neck after a simulated mountain bike crash. This patient had broken ribs and a sprained wrist.

Sometimes patients were in awkward positions. I was the patient in this scenario and I was pinned under a tree in my tent. My responders had to get me clear of the hazard, assess my condition, and keep me warm.

This was a large simulation with a group of people that "fell" when a rope bridge collapsed. Injuries ranged from broken legs to concussions. This mass casualty scenario was also more complicated because some patients had previous medical issues like asthma, angina, and diabetes.

Hold Your Ground

The first big lesson that I got to contribute to and lead was our "Hold Your Ground" lesson plan. This was my first geology lesson, so I was dying to jump in since I am a Geoscience major. Hold your ground deals with weather and erosion and always includes a cool hike. One of these sessions was held at Quarry View Park near Table Rock so we got to take a way cool hike. Half the group would hike and half the group would cycle through stations staffed by FLC staff and volunteers, then they would switch.

The Castle Rock loop. 1.4 miles with 500 feet of elevation gain.

I wanted to be sure I had my facts down since I haven't hiked this trail in at least a year, so I went out a 6:30 am and hiked the trail in the dark. I then hiked it two more times with the kids, so I had a heckuva day on the trail. This was a great experience for me to learn and to see the excitement that kids exhibit when they are outdoors. I see this over and over again in this position and I am starting to develop a very strong belief that we need to have more outdoor education. It was also a good opportunity to learn about classroom management outside of the classroom and setting a walking pace that all of the kids can follow. The biggest challenge is trying to teach in an environment that is so distracting. If a group of kids spots a rabbit or a toad, they aren't going to pay attention to the lesson at all.

Geology in the Foothills.

Now we're talking my language! The learning center has a 4-hour geology lesson that we teach at the facility. Carolyn (my supervisor) and I spent many hours reviewing the current lesson and making changes to streamline it and give the lesson more impact. This is a great plan for 5th/6th grade students. We get to introduce them to new concepts like the rock cycle, erosion, stream transport, weathering, and geomorphology (we call it land forms). As an instructor, this combines classroom learning, the scientific method, class management, multi-media information sharing, physical activity, civic responsibility, and teaching kids to visualize prehistoric Earth. This is exceptionally rewarding and very tiring. We are "on" from before the kids get here and until they leave. It usually ends with the staff collapsed around a table eating lunch and swapping stories. As exhausting as it is, it is quickly becoming my favorite activity. Not only because the subject is in my wheelhouse, but the extended session allows me an opportunity to form relationships with the students.

Students make observations of a cliff from a distance and make hypothesis about the processes that may have formed it.

This hillside is always popular and never fails to produce a pile of rowdy 5th graders.

We were fortunate enough to borrow a stream table from the US Forest Service. With this table we could demonstrate the formation and draining of Ancient Lake Idaho and the land forms that were created afterward. This is followed by a hike that shows the real-life version of the same events.

The kid who doesn't mind lying in the dirt and getting his face up against a sandstone cliff is a future geologist for sure!

The Swarming of the Bees.

This was wicked cool, and apparently something that few people get to see, I was sitting in my office and I looked out the window to see THOUSANDS of bees outside. It was a cloud of bees about the size of a single car garage. We went out to see what was happening and discovered that our demonstration hive was swarming. Swarming is how bees divide a colony and move to a new location to reproduce. The queen bee will birth some new queens and then leave to find a new home. They do this when food is plentiful and the colony is strong so it is a good sign. About half of the colony goes with the queen and half stays behind. Our bee wrangler estimated up to 10,000 bees in this swarm! A volunteer from the Treasure Valley Beekeepers Club came and collected the swarm before they made a new home. This way we have a "spare" colony in case our demonstration hive doesn't prosper.

All of the specks in this picture are bees.

The swarm eventually condenses around the queen. This wad of bees has up to 10,000 bees in it. The queen is somewhere in the middle. You could actually feel the heat radiating from the swarm when you got within a few feet of it. They were surprisingly docile.

Dick from TVBC came out to collect our swarm. They will stay on a branch while scouts look for a new home. This could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Dick set up a "perfect" hive and set it inches from the swarm. This way, the bees find it and move right it. It only takes a few minutes and they start pouring in like water.

There were some kids visiting the area from Portland, OR. We let them put on the jacket and get up close. Boy do they have a spring break story to tell when they get home!