Seeds and an adventure

This morning we had time to finalize our plans for our projects. We solidified exactly what studies we would do and wrote up a detailed timeline of what we would accomplish each day.  I think that things are looking good as far as our plan, we have a lot of elements but each one shouldn't be too time intensive.

 We also had Lara's reading facilitation that focused on experiential learning. She did a very similar activity to one that I have done on Thompson Island. We started by observing and sketching lima beans and a corn kernels that had been germinated for various amounts of time.

Then we looked at a wide variety of seeds to learn about how diverse the types of seeds are (floaters such as dandelions, fleshy fruits, and sticky pods to name a few).

The third task was to go outside and try to find some seeds on our own. Everyone was amazed by the variety and amount of seeds located right outside our classroom.  It was a very well thought out and planned activity. There was a lot of time for student exploration and questioning. Overall it was a great example of an experiential lesson.

In the afternoon we hiked out to our site to try to locate the black gum. Dan had given us the coordinates but we were still unsure.  We ended up bushwacking our way through the woods for almost 45 minutes before we came to it! I was proud of our group though for sticking to it even though we were hot, it was buggy, we were getting scratched up by brush and we had very little clues to go off of. The way we all kept our cool and worked together hopefully indicates that we will be a good group together.  From an educator standpoint, talk about an authentic experience in experiential education.  We assigned a leader (person who had the GPS (me early on and then Kim)), we communicated to check where everyone was if we were hidden by brush and we worked together to hold aside branches and decide where to go next.  At our site we made our 150m2 plot that we will use to measure trees and check for activity. It went smoothly except this site ha a lot more small bushes than our site in college woods had which made getting the tape measure straight a challenge. After a little finagling we got it to work out.
Tomorrow we will be setting our our critter cams and doing the first of our assessments.

A little friend that helped boost our spirits during our adventure