Bittersweet Removal

Last Friday the students in our class worked on a service project on our UME campus.  Before we went

Lesson before we outside

outside we learned about how to identify the various vines that can be found on our campus so that we could differentiate between poison ivy and bittersweet.  We learned that bittersweet is a vine that has alternate patterned leaves and can hang loosely from a tree or twine very tightly to almost suffocate the tree.  Poison ivy has three leaves and grows in the opposite pattern of leaves and hugs the tree very tightly with tiny hairs holding on to the tree.  We also learned about native grape vine and Virginia Creeper which can both be found in our woods locally.

After the children learned how to identify the vines we went outside with our tools and got to work.  In less than an hour we successfully removed two huge buckets of bittersweet including one section that included berries.  The children learned that the berries are the most important thing to remove since that is were the all important seeds  are that spread the bittersweet.  We also learned how to remove it.  You have to cut it at the ground and also above your head and then keep checking on it in the future to make sure it does not grow back together.

We even had to unwind the bittersweet from around a few trees.  It was so tight on one tree that it is 

impeding the growth of the tree and actually cutting into the bark as the tree is growing.  The students were very excited about this project and asked if we could continue to work on this one
section that has a lot of bittersweet in it.  I think we will continue with this service project since it gives them good volunteer experience as well as empowering them to do good things for their school community. 

4th Grade Goes Native!

Project Native Gardens

On 9/30/13 Mrs.Garcia's 4th grade class went to Project Native Gardens.This piture is at the end of the trip on the way to the butterfly house.Before that we were in the field walking around and collecting seeds.  My favorite part of the trip was walking along and looking at the beautiful flowers.  I saw so many flowers there, more then really anywhere!  I got stinging nettle while collecting seeds and so did some other people.  In the end it was great!
Written by Charlottte

 The children collected seeds in the seed field and we will be drying them over the next month.  Then we will store them until the spring when we make seed balls out of sand, soil and compost.  When we do the garlic mustard removal in April we will scatter the native seed balls so that native flowers grow again where the invasives had taken over.

 We started our afternoon in a circle learning about Project Native and the great work they are doing there.  Their goal is to grow native plants from seeds to have the community  plant in their home gardens. 

A bag of Joe Pye Weed seeds

.

Bean Seeds and Flowers

     Some of our bean seeds have started to grow, one of them has grown out of  its CD case. 3 of them look like they're not going to grow, because they haven't grown at all since we planted them and we started them about 2 weeks ago. A couple of them look like they are colapsing in on themselves including mine. .                We are also have filled foam cups with water and put food dye in them. Some people chose blue dye or green and 3 people chose red. One person's flower has started to turn green as the stem pulls the water up it.  Hopefully the rest of ours will turn the colors over the weekend.    

Our beans are escaping

Keenan's flower is turning green

Written by Justin

Trillions of Trees

     Today,September 26`th, 2013,we measured trees. we`ve been working on this since Tuesday, and its been very fun. Well here`s what happened today. First we learned how to measure the diameter, the circumference, and the height. The measurement required a lot of  patience and teamwork, we had to make some adjustments and final answers.  In our group, first stop was mystery tree number 2 which is Blake's tree.  The next stop was Mikel's tree which happened to be the largest tree in our group. Then we looked for Logan's tree which we didn`t find, sadly. The good news was, Mrs. Garcia was able to find a tree that looked like Logan's,so we used that tree. Next, we stopped at my tree.My tree was small, but it had a lot of   features to it.  Then we got to measure Hunter's tree. It was quite large, but not as large as Mikel's  tree. Last, we stopped at Lucian's tree. His tree was a sapling, so it was the smallest tree, of course.  The mystery tree project was really fun, and I hope to do it again. Next week we will be finding out what the name of our mystery tree is by using websites and tree identification books.  We will look up our tree based on its characteristics using a dichotomous key.                              
Written by Kathryn

Measuring diameter using parallel yardsticks.

Teamwork: holding a frame so a classmate can draw the bark.

Pre-teaching the math concepts to use in the field.

Tree Characteristics

     Today Mr.Abrams came back in and we are working on non-living and living things that are part of the forest ecosystem.We are making posters that say leaf ,twig ,height,and bark.Today we did the first

part of it.We colored the leaf and twig part today.We each have a mystery tree and we have to draw a picture of  the leaf and the twig of the mystery tree we got. My leaf  had a hole on the right side of it and you can see the vanes on the back of it .

On the front of it, it had a caterpillar trail.  It was pretty cool. My twig had little seeds popping out of it and there was at least 5 leaves coming out of the twig.We all had a great time doing this project of  the mystery tree.

 Written by Keenan

DIchotomous Keying

Almost there... a few more questions.

     In order to understand how to use a dichotomous key for our tree project we used this concepts with seeds today.  The children were asked to come up with a yes or no question to start classifying their seeds.  Our first question was is this seed brownish red or not?  That broke the seeds into 2 groups.  From there we broke the brownish red group into 2 more groups.
     Once we were done with the brownish red seeds we moved on to the seeds that were left.  I am extremely excited about how well the kids did with coming up with their yes or no questions and breaking their seed groups down to a group of one kind of seed that could then be looked up and identified by its physical characteristic.  It was clearly one of those "AHAH" moments.

Now it will be fun to see them do this with their tree study starting next week.  Is this a coniferous tree?  yes or no?  Is it an opposite branching tree?  yes or no?  until their mystery tree is identified.  FUN, FUN, FUN.

A Walk in the Woods

     Today we walked near the vernal pool on our campus looking for parts of the Tree Life Cycle

Mr. Abrams teaching us at the vernal pools

.  We found evidence of seedlings, saplings, mature trees and decomposing trees.  This is the life cycle of the tree and the trees in the forest.  They are all part of a system called the forest ecosystem.  We also were looking for evidence of life.  We found consumers such as Red Efts, which are carnivores and also frogs.  We also found producers which are plants.

Decomposers are very important in a forest because they break down trees and other plant life.  The decomposers we found were many kinds of mushrooms.  Some were stringy, some looked like a dome, and some were flat.  Some even looked like coral.  We learned that most of the fungis is actually under ground or in a decomposing tree.  The mushroom is kind of like the flower where its spores are released to make more fungis.

    

While we were outside we took notes on our charts and we sketched what we found and colored it in to show the systems of a forest.
      Mr. Dale Abrams was our guest today.  He lead us on our walk and taught us lots about the forest.

Written by Hunter