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Start the Year Connecting to Your Local Biodiversity
By Joanna Snyder, FOSS Curriculum Specialist/OBIS Co-Director
Across the country, the fall season often offers exciting opportunities to experience biodiversity. Fall often produces easily observable, measurable seasonal changes. What better way to start the year than by integrating outdoor activities that take advantage of your schoolyard?
To help teachers extend learning into local environments, FOSS has launched a new outdoor initiative. The FOSS Outdoors Initiative is our commitment to connecting children to nature and environment by
- embedding outdoor investigations within every K–6 FOSS module for the upcoming © 2012 National Revision;
- resurrecting and modernizing a traditional outdoor education resource the Outdoor Biology Instructional Strategies (OBIS) program; and
- offering a Web-based middle school photo challenge network called Planet FOSS.
Here are several simple ways to start the school year off connecting to your schoolyard and your students.
Conduct parts of some FOSS investigations in your schoolyard.
As a result of a partnership with the Boston Schoolyard Initiative (profiled in the Fall 2008 Newsletter), supplemental guides are available to help you go outside. These supplemental guides are available on www.FOSSweb.com for 12 modules.
To download a Science in the Schoolyard supplemental guide, go to FOSSweb. Navigate to one of the 12 modules listed. Go to For Parents and Teachers/Teacher Resources and click on the Taking Science Outdoors backpack icon. You can download the BSI guide as PDFs.
Students collect and sort leaf samples to determine how many species of plants grow in the activity site in the Plant Hunt activity.
Outdoor Biology Instructional Strategies (OBIS) is an outdoor program that offers young people fun and rewarding opportunities to investigate ecological relationships in their local environment. Here are three activities to get your class started outdoors.
1. In Plant Hunt, students work in groups to collect a leaf sample from as many species as possible in a defined area. Together as a class they sort samples to determine how many species of plants grow in the activity site.
2. In Litter Critters, students observe and collect organisms that live in leaf litter and under trees and shrubs.
3. In Animal Diversity, students use sweep nets to sample and compare the insects living in a managed grassland (lawn) and an unmanaged (weedy) area. Included in the OBIS activity folio are simple instructions to make your own sweep nets.
These are just a few of the 97 activities available at no cost online. The website also offers suggestions for activities that connect specifically with many of the FOSS modules.
Join us for Taking FOSS Outdoors K–8, Regional NSTA full-day workshops.
Register to join us on the Wednesday before each 2010 Regional NSTA Conference this fall as we model simple and effective strategies for using the schoolyard and the local outdoor environment when teaching FOSS and OBIS. You will experience firsthand, the power of opening the classroom door and stepping outside. Using the schoolyard is an extremely effective means to reinforce, extend, and apply student classroom learning.
We will discuss current research that documents the value of outdoor teaching. In addition, you will receive resources that describe how the outdoors can serve as a resource to enhance your teaching and enrich your school community.
Time outdoors during the school day is beneficial for student learning. Students who are exposed to hands-on experiences in their local environment often become enthusiastic, self-motivated learners and academically outperform their peers who do not have these learning opportunities (Liebermann and Hoody, 1998). What better way to start the year than with a strong, motivated group of students?
Take your class outdoors and explore the biodiversity of your schoolyard; we promise you won't be disappointed.Studies have shown that students who participate in outdoor instruction report they enjoy school more in general and feel more supported and trusted by their teacher than they did prior to the outdoor experiences (Shaw and Terrance, 1981).
References
Liebermann, G., and L. Hoody. 1998. Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrated Context for Learning; Results of a National Study. San Diego: State Education and Environment Roundtable.
Shaw, T. J., and Terrance, J. M. 1981. “Involved and Uninvolved Student Perceptions in Indoor and Outdoor School Settings.” Journal of Early Adolescence, 1:135–146.
Teachers participate in OBIS and FOSS outdoors activities during the 2010 National NSTA Conference in Philadelphia.
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