My students need a variety of 9 field guides and all weather science journals for their scientific investigations and naturalist career exploration projects.
How do you view the world? Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods opened people's eyes to the dilemma faced by children today. This project is designed to get my students engaged in the natural world through inquiry and exploration from a naturalist viewpoint. Help me, help them, help the world.
Even though Idaho is a rural state, my students come from an inner city community in the heart of the Treasure Valley.
We are an arts integrated charter school with a diverse student population. A majority of my students qualify for free and reduced lunch. Despite our strip mall location we interact with the natural world as much as possible through trips to the local wetland reserve behind our school. However, our resources are limited, and access to specialized books and materials for scientific inquiry often prohibits us from exploring valuable subject matter deeper. This group of energetic 7th and 8th graders possesses a love for learning and is especially interested in scientific investigation. Their interest in the natural world is as diverse as they are, so having a large selection of field guides is tremendously important to this investigation.
My Project
Think about the first time you were truly inspired to learn. What lit the spark that led to your career choice? Or perhaps you still don't know what you want to be when you grow up. As adolescents career exploration can ignite a passion that drives a desire for learning far beyond their middle school years. It is this kind of passion that projects like Last Child in the Classroom have the potential of producing. Having access to professional resources and scientific tools brings a level of sophistication to a kid's classroom experiences. This naturalist project will give my students an opportunity to choose their topic of exploration, research process, and method of demonstrating their learning. Research shows, with choice comes by in and enduring understandings. What will it be, botany, entomology, ornithology, zoology? The choice is all theirs.
Loren Eiseley said "The journey is difficult, immense.
We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know". I say life's too short to not give it a shot, so why not start now? Be a spark. You never know. It might inspire the next Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or James Audubon.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Miller and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.