Expedition Yellowstone: Finding Our Place in Science
My students need buses to experience place-based learning in the natural laboratory of Yellowstone National Park!
$4,096 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
Overcoming adversity and obstacles is a way of life for my kids. They walk into my classroom every day dragging baggage with them in the form of poverty, language deficits, and traumatic home lives. Our district is 100% free lunch and 70% minority students. These are bright students with a wide range of talents and abilities but due to the stumbling blocks in front of them, many of them will drop out or settle for lives that are well below their potential.
My students are not sure that they can succeed in math and science because they do not see people that look like them in our textbooks.
They have few role models to help them explore college and career options. Building my students' confidence in their own ability to learn about the world around them becomes a key job for the middle school teachers in my district. My kids are working hard to make success their goal.
My Project
Coming from a background of poverty often means that my students do not have the same background experiences as their peers. Learning science is difficult for my students because they do not have a mental filing cabinet of rich connections to help create relevance and meaning in their learning. It is hard to talk about volcanoes when you have never seen one and it is hard to understand ecosystems when you haven't been outside the paved sidewalks of your town.
Expedition Yellowstone is a ranger-led, residential science program that is offered by the National Park Service.
My students live 6 hours away from the park and yet, 90% of them will never get there without help from generous donations from people who care about STEM education.
Exploring Yellowstone will allow my students the chance to see themselves as scientists. We will have hands-on interactions with the geology, biology, and ecology topics that we have covered in class over their course of their middle school science curriculum. The lessons are wrapped around state and national science standards and serve as a capstone activity at the culmination of their 7th and 8th grade coursework. Seeing students' faces light up when they make the connections between themselves and the world that they live in is priceless. One student said "I wish that I had really understood how connected I am to the things that we talked about in class this year! No wonder you wanted to teach us about our planet." Participating in this project creates citizen scinetists who understand their place in their global ecosystem.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
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. Ferro and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
