School News
Environmental Ed Week sends students to the fields, woods, and ponds
Posted 04/30/2014 12:00AM
"Look we what we found!" cried a fifth grader, hoisting aloft a plastic container filled with blobs of transparent goop and tiny black "seeds" as he perched on the edge of a vernal pool in Estabrook Woods, across the street from campus. "They're some kind of eggs!"
The "some kind of eggs" turned out to be two varieties, identified by their teachers as future wood frogs and salamanders. Most were returned to the pond, with a few carried back to Fenn to examine under a microscope and attempt to ""hatch.""
The boys, led by teachers John Byrd and Alan O'Neill, were outdoors that day to participate in National Environmental Education Week in mid-April. Students in several classes headed to the greens outside their classrooms and to the fields and woods beyond to tackle such tasks as gathering leaves that were placed in an area stream by their teacher (Pauline MacClellan) in which they would later look for macro invertebrates who had made their homes in the bags of leaf litter; participating in a math scavenger hunt (at the end they had to solve the math problems they found); or, with teacher Dave Duane, measuring solar energy input at different angles with photovoltaic cells connected to an energy meter.
National Environmental Education Week is the nation's largest celebration of environmental education and is held the week before Earth Day.