This activity is a field-based investigation involving identifying and investigating common trees on the schoolyard and creating a field guide containing pressed leaves.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This lesson is a classroom and field-based activity where students learn about the parts of a flower through observation, journaling, and Observation.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This activity is a field investigation where students observe evidence of erosion and deposition in the schoolyard or designated area.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This activity is a field investigation of the bird population in the schoolyard and how the students will plan to attract more birds.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This activity is an inquiry based lesson focused on students making observations of birds in order to problem solve how to attract more birds to a schoolyard.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Students will test the percolation rates of 6 different soil samples. Three of the samples are measured sand and clay and three are collected from the schoolyard and wetland.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Simulation
This activity is a classroom and schoolyard investigation where students collect daily temperature and precipitation readings, weather observations, and weekly phenology reports in a phenology binder and in nature journals. Students then analyze this data and compare to recorded values in the Weatherguide calendar.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This series of 5 high-quality, standards-aligned, inquiry-based activities and one STEM challenge have been field-tested by secong grade students and families of Wequiock Children's Center for Environmental Science during Safer At Home orders. These activities encourage students to use natural areas around their homes and in their neigbhorhoods as they improve their science and engineering skils relating to plant and animals interdependence. Created as a part of a WISELearn OER Innovation project, Connect, Explore, and Engage: Using the Environment as the Context for Science Learning was a collaboration of the Wequiock Children's Center for Environmental Science and the Wisconsin Green Schools Network. One of the goals of the project was to create standards-aligned lessons that utilize the outdoor spaces of the school (as well as those of the students' homes). These lessons were created to take place during the spring. However, some of the lessons could be conducted during the fall. Cut flowers from a florist may be used in place of ones found living outdoors.The title image was used with permission and is courtesy of Joe Riederer. The observation protocol "I Notice, I Wonder, It Reminds Me Of, I Think Maybe" has been adapted from that of the BEETLES Project.
Material Type: Unit of Study
In this field lab students will go outside and observe a particular area of the schoolyard. Students will design investigations to complete outside and will use outdoor observations to provide evidence for our indoor activities.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
A key component of wildlife management is understanding the impact that humans have on their surrounding environment. In this activity students will begin to explore the human impacts that their school yard is experiencing from air, soil, and water pollution.
Material Type: Lesson, Lesson Plan
This activity is a classroom and field activity where students learn about and practice scientific observations in the classroom and then complete a field activity by making and recording scientific observations on school grounds.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
In this activity, students learn about the urban heat island effect by investigating which areas of their schoolyard have higher temperatures - trees, grass, asphalt, and other materials. Based on their results, they hypothesize how concentrations of surfaces that absorb heat might affect the temperature in cities - the urban heat island effect. Then they analyze data about the history of Los Angeles heat waves and look for patterns in the Los Angeles climate data and explore patterns.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This activity is a field investigation of the biodiversity in a given area. The exercise will give students experience making scientific observations and creating a dichotomous key.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Short Description: This is an inquiry investigation, geared toward student use of outdoor schoolyard sites. Its focus is to have students applying what they've learned about the scientific method and experimental design, gathering quantitative evidence to support hypotheses.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Lesson Plan
This activity is designed to help students understand the importance of observations in science. It encourages them to work on the skill of observation and communicating those observations to others in the process of scientific inquiry. Based on an original activity from Schoolyard Ecology Explorations.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Lesson Plan
This field study introduction to biology helps students answer the questions "What is biology" while looking at the biology that can be found in everyday surroundings.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Lesson Plan
This activity is a field investigation where student gather data on organisms they find in or around a pond.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This unit includes five nature journaling experiences implemented at High Marq Environmental Charter School during the 2021-22 school year. They are a bit of a grab bag in terms of subject and skills focus, but all included practices from How to Teach Nature Journaling by Emilie Lygren and John Muir Laws. Please Remix this template for your purposes.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Learning Task
The following six OERS for grades K-5 are designed for teachers to use the outdoor spaces around their schools for learning with the goals of connecting students with their sense of place and well-being. Together, the six experiences comprise a school-wide mini-unit in which each grade level explore an Investigative Question. Collectively, each Investigative Question leads the entire student body in considering the Essential Question of the mini-unit. A school leadership team identified the Wisconsin Standards for Environmental Literacy and Sustainability (ELS) to be addressed at every grade level and developed an Essential Question to be explored.FIELD Edventures educators provided teachers with an introduction to outdoor, place-based inquiry learning, unpacked ELS, and met with grade level teams to co-create inquiry questions (called Investigative Questions in the lessons that follow) for their students to investigate outside each quarter. These OERs were co-taught with teachers and FIELD educators and were refined during co-reflection.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This activity is a field investigation where students collect bugs using homemade pit traps, sort them into groups, and then graph their results.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
