The SMILE Program @ OSU

During our August Teacher’s Workshop, teachers spent an afternoon at Hesthavn Nature Center learning about watershed stewardship projects. They rotated through various stations in order to gain ideas for creating projects back in their schools. These stations included riparian, macroinvertebrates, water quality, photopoint monitoring, plant identification, and the StreamWebs database. You can find all of the resources that were shared on the StreamWebs resources web page: http://www.streamwebs.org/resources.

Curriculum for the plant identification portion of the StreamWebs activities is also available. Click here to access the curriculum.

In addition to the resources that you can find on the StreamWebs site, SMILE has created a limited number of StreamWebs educator kits for SMILE’s teachers to borrow for use in their communities. There are three different kits available: riparian, water quality, and macro invertebrates. See the pictures below for the contents of the kits. If you are interested in taking advantage of this opportunity, please contact Renee O’Neill at renee.oneill@oregonstate.edu.

Next week at our Teacher’s Workshop, Renee O’Neill will be presenting a new set of activities about owls, owl pellets, ecosystems, and food webs for use in at the elementary level. We are very excited about these activities, as they are hands-on, interactive, and fun! Check out the different lessons and components at the links below. We look forward to seeing you at our Workshop!

If you are interested in ordering owl pellets from researcher Rebecca Terry for dissection in your SMILE clubs, please contact Renee O’Neill at renee.oneill@oregonstate.edu.

Lesson 1

All About Owls: click here

All About Owls Powerpoint: click here

Habitat Activity: click here

Whooo Am I Brochures: click here

Lesson 2

Owl Pellet Dissection (Part 1): click here

Bone Identification Sheet: click here

Lesson 3

Owl Pellet Dissection (Part 2): click here

Mice and Munchies: click here

Lesson 4

Specialists vs. Generalists: click here

Lesson 5

I’m in Danger: click here

Other activities:

Survivor: click here

With Easter around the corner we wanted to show you some natural ways to dye your eggs.  The SMILE Club at Forest Grove High School shared with us the experiment they completed during a club meeting.  They used things found in nature like grass, cranberries, and apple skins to create their colorful eggs.  Check out their work and have a Happy Easter!

During the 2014 Winter Teacher’s Workshop, participants learned about StreamWebs, an online database that provides teachers, students, and community partners with a multimedia showcase for watershed stewardship projects.  StreamWebs provides a variety of resources that support student monitoring efforts including: sampling equipment, field support, and curriculum.  To learn more about StreamWebs click HERE.

As an addition to the schoolyard geology activities that were shared in Matt Nyman’s session during the Winter 2014 SMILE Teacher’s Workshop, here is a 4-lesson unit on Earth Science that can be done in the classroom.

Lesson 1 – Earth Layers

This lesson explores Earth, and it’s layers.  Students will be able to construct their own mini Earths according to different layers.

Lesson 2 – Plate Tectonics

Students will be able to explore the plates and their boundaries of the Earth. This lesson serves to explain how earthquakes and volcanoes come to be.

Lesson 3 – Earthquakes

This lesson explores earthquakes, how they happen, and how to stay safe.

Lesson 4 – Volcanoes

Students will explore the different Pacific Northwest volcanoes and get the opportunity to construct their own volcanoes.

At the SMILE Teacher’s Workshop Spring 2013, Brad Agenbroad and Ian Niktab presented similar activities to those below.  Other activities can be found on their blog.

Bottle Biology

This activity helps students explore the connection between land and water by allowing them to build a TerraAqua Column and change different variables of the system and observing their effects. These TerraAqua Columns are made from an empty two-liter bottle and other easily recycled items that can be acquired at little to no cost.

2-Liter Bottle Worm Bin: Garbage Eating Worms

In this activity students will learn about the importance that earthworms and microorganisms play in creating soil.  Students will make their own worm farm and will be able to watch the worms turn organic garbage into soil. This hands on activity can also be made easily with found materials.

The links below have really clear instructions that should be easy to follow. The last link is for a larger container that the worms can live in for a longer period of time. Brad suggests the small red wigglers, rather than night crawlers (they tend to get out at night.) If you use the liter bottles, they can live in there for a couple weeks, but you will need to watch the moisture and feed.

Here are the exact lessons that Brad and Ian presented in the Workshop:

https://suite101.com/a/popbottle-wormery-science-craft-a124055

http://www.spelloutloud.com/observing-worms-with-preschoolers.html

GreenWood Resources, home to the largest drip irrigation farm in the world, was nice enough to provide our workshop attendees with several varieties of poplar saplings.  With these saplings we ask that you and your students plant them and conduct your own growth experiment.  Here we have provided for you a lesson plan as well as planting instructions for your trees.  We would like to see data about your sapling’s progress and we will provide a way to share that data in the near future. Enjoy!