This year I had the pleasure of partnering with Heather Essig a science teacher at Visitation Academy. Following is an article describing her experience getting her students outside.
Litzsinger Road Ecology Center has been making a difference in student engagement in the environment, and the partnership has helped create a new prairie area and revitalized a long forgotten trail. Sixth graders have worked to improve their courtyard at Visitation. A Junior/Senior Environmental Science class has created the prairie with the support of the Litzsinger staff. Students have added plants to the spot by a winter seed stomp and by planting native plants that they started indoors this year.
The entire community came together to restore and lengthen a nature trail in the back of the school that had been overrun with Japanese Honeysuckle and poison ivy. Families came during a couple of weekend workdays to clear the path, spread mulch, remove invasive plants, and restore signs with meditative statements. This pathway is now being used by many different classes as a place for students to explore nature and reduce student stress.
Sixth grade classes have gone outdoors to a central courtyard for an engineering project with the support of the Litzsinger center. They explored the space, found problems that they might solve, and then designed ways that they could make the space more useable. For their final project families of 6th graders came on a Sunday, and everyone pitched in to paint a wall that needed repair, plant a native garden, create an outdoor classroom with log seats, move and spread 125 bags of mulch, and weed the gardens. It is so fun to see how this project has really caused the students to be passionate and enjoy their courtyard as their classes meet outside or when they are playing outside after lunch.
