The Day Before

        We (Emily, Quincey, and Heather) are teaching a lesson about pollinators to a third grade class at Booksin Elementary on Thursday, April 24.  We will be leaving class early in order to be at the school to have enough time to teach the students.  We plan to run two activities - creating biodegradable pots to plant either a marigold or sunflower seed, and  playing a tag game to help the students visualize the idea of pollinators.

Introduction

        Our names are Heather Wright, Quincey Caldwell, and Emily McCabe, and we are freshmen attending Willow Glen High School. This semester in our Honors Biology class, we were assigned to propose and develop an ecology-based, service-oriented project, aimed to cultivate our interpersonal skills, apply our learned knowledge of biological systems, and foster a deeper value of the role that these systems play in the sustainment of natural life.
       Despite having been provided with a number of pre-planned ESLP's (Ecology Service Learning Projects), we decided to compose, plan, and execute an entirely original project; we visited Booksin Elementary School and directed an hour-long lesson and activity about pollination to Mrs. Braunstein's third grade class.  
        We taught small, 10-15 minute lesson outlining the process of pollination, the plant parts involved, and common pollinators. We then had the students play a short tag game that simulated the physical interaction of flowering plants and various pollinators. Finally, we directed the students through an activity in which they built biodegradable seed packets, for them to transfer either into the school garden or at home.  Students made small, closed pockets of newspaper containing soil and several seeds, that can be planted directly into the ground.