Interdisciplinary Teaching About Earth for a Sustainable Future
Help me give my students soil sampler to understand how to take a soil samples to estimate the plant-available concentrations of plant nutrients, in order to determine fertilizer recommendations in agriculture, geochemical and ecological investigation.
My students are coming from low-income families. Their parents are not earning much so students are doing jobs in restaurants or fast food chains to meet their daily needs. About 80%-90% of my students are on reduced-price and free lunches. To motivate my students in their academic performances I have to do experiments and hands-on activities to give them the basic understanding of scientific concepts to gain knowledge to device their own experiments.
There is a strong emphasis on creating a safe learning environment in school, but students are from different social economic backgrounds, which affects their learning by losing their interest in academics.
Students come from diverse backgrounds with different work habits like doing midnight jobs and conditions like homelessness, crimes, recent immigrants, on welfare, pregnant, and living in foster families. All these factors influence student learning, so I try to encourage them to talk each other and ask questions, clarify misconceptions, and maximize learning opportunities. I tailor my instruction to engage students through demonstration, real-life examples, and hands-on experiments.
My Project
Helping to donate the soil sampler and the models of earth systems for my students will give them skills, knowledge, and hands-on experience in their investigation of the formation of soil characteristic, and their issues with multiple earth system. This investigation addresses the grand challenges facing society today in many fields like fertilizer & pesticide industry, food industry, agricultural methods, and soil erosion.
They consider the interdisciplinary nature of soil sustainability by relating soil properties to increased anthropogenic soil erosion rates due to agriculture and then explaining the effects of various agricultural methods on these soil properties.
Students then engage in systems thinking by offering solutions to prevent soil erosion and relating the importance of prevention efforts to the potential for increased erosion due to climate change.
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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. Mital and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
