Where to start? (Outdoor and Environmental Education)

October 17th, 2013

A few weeks ago I had a great group of students here from Jacob Hespler Secondary School. We had a fun time at the pond and the students were suitably impressed by the wide variety of living things we were catching.

I often discuss with the visiting teachers how they address ecology in the classroom, this helps me frame what I do with their students at the centre (I am often impressed with the variety of approaches our teachers take to teach ecology). I asked the teacher that day, Yvonne, what she was doing. I really liked how she began her ecology unit… so much so that I am going to share it here.

She started her ecology unit with a fun little quiz. Yvonne first presented her students with 16 samples of local native species, mostly plants and invertebrates, all of them things easy to find in any urban woodlot. She had them identify, as best they could, what everything was and write down their results.

Then, Yvonne presented her students with 16 Disney characters and had them identify who everyone was. These results were also written down and then all 32 answers were marked (full marks for correct answers, half marks if they were even close).

The two quizzes were tallied separately, and the class results shared. As you might imagine, the class average for identifying local native species was poor (out of kindness I won’t give grades here), while identifying Disney Characters was VERY high.

Although this result is not terribly shocking, perhaps it should be. Certainly it impressed upon the students how little they understand about their environment when they so clearly were more aware of things that are fictitious. Great discussion followed and it created a great jumping off point for the rest of her ecology unit.

Yvonne explained that the idea for this quiz came from a book, “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv, which Yvonne highly recommends.

Here is a quick quiz for you to test your knowledge of local natural history. These are all things I have seen with classes while wandering around in Waterloo Region.