Teachers learn to turn schoolyards into ecological wonderlands

Clustered around a table brimming with wildflowers, teachers from the Kings Valley Charter School sat clutching leaves in their hands, staring at flowers through magnifying glasses hanging around their necks, and making copious notes.

For two days last week, the teachers were the students, as they learned about everything from conducting insect collections to identifying plant families.

"The leaves are soft, they're not waxy," Pat Prevost said as she examined one of the plants sitting on the table in front of her team.

"I have no clue what this one is," her team partner, Julie Rain, said a bit mournfully.

The workshop, held at the Beazell Memorial Forest near Kings Valley, was the first step in a yearlong project called "Restore Oregon Schoolyards." Teachers from Kings Valley and Muddy Creek charter schools as well as Mountain View Elementary took part in the two-day workshop. This fall they'll return to their schools to prepare to lead their students in ecological restoration projects in their schoolyards.

When they're done, the students and teachers will have "built" outdoor natural classrooms.

The teachers will be incorporating science, math, literacy and history into their projects, to make the restoration activities a comprehensive learning experience, explained Jen Cramer of the Institute for Applied Ecology, which led the workshop. The project is a partnership between the institute, the Benton Soil and Water District, 4-H and the Earth Partnership for Schools. It was funded by a $15,000 grant from the Oregon Community Foundation Gray Family Fund for Environmental Education.

Some Corvallis schools already have a 4-H Wildlife Stewards program, which uses trained community volunteers to help children explore wild areas around their schoolyards. This new program can complement that work by getting teachers involved in restoration work, and helping create new natural areas to use for research.

The two-day kickoff workshop introduced teachers to examining native ecosystems from the perspective of teachers and learners.

It included everything from plant identification to how to do reflection exercises about nature.

For the next school year, the teachers will be doing monthly projects that lead up to the creation of a new habitat for native species on their school property, beginning with site analysis and mapping, creating a design of the new site, and preparation and planting. Cramer hopes that teachers will build connections with their communities during the project, recruit volunteers and gather donations to make these schoolyard natural areas community gathering places.

"A big part of this is making community connections," Cramer said. She will be checking in with each school on a monthly basis.

During one of the workshop's outdoor exercises, teams had to conduct an experiment where they used different colored plastic bowls filled with soapy water to trap insects. Each team had to come up with a question they wanted answered, and had to lay out the variables involved in their experiment. Rain, Prevost and Dean Sprague, also of Kings Valley Charter School, decided to experiment with two different sets of colored bowls, one placed by a creek; one by a towering deciduous tree, to see if more insects were drawn to darker- or lighter-colored bowls.

"Look, there's a member of the sunflower family!" Rain said as they made their way down to the creek, putting their new botany skills into practice, which also helped them avoid a thick patch of stinging nettles.

Prevost and Rain said the Kings Valley Charter School is the perfect setting for an ecological restoration project, as it's already bordered by natural areas, including a nearby river.

"We can see elk in the mornings," Prevost said. "It's really cool. (The kids) like to find where the elk have bedded down."

Soon, they'll be able to put what they learned at the workshop into practice, and eventually will create their own special nature places for students to conduct the same kind of experiments in their own back yard.

"It (will be) a great place to do research on school grounds," Cramer said. "You don't have to pay for a bus, you can just walk right outside."