Making Science Come Alive! From Pond Snails to Cockroaches
My students need pond snails, duckweed, hissing cockroaches, a water quality test kit, clipboards, rotten wood, and a whiteboard easel to establish and maintain living ecosystems in our classroom.
FULLY FUNDED! Ms. Holland's classroom raised $418
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.
My Students
It's often said that as we grow older we begin to get less curious. My students defy this. As the school year goes on, they get more curious as they make connections between concepts and start looking at the world in new ways.
My students are curious and creative problem solvers who make insightful observations as they engage with and learn from each other.
I teach at a Title I school with a diverse population of students who show me every day that, if given the chance, they will rise to the occasion.
My Project
When students first walk into our classroom it can be a little overwhelming. With two aeroponic gardens full of vegetables, a 29 gallon tank of trout eggs, a hundred plus mosquito fish, and a table full of invertebrate habitats, we have a lot going on. But with over two hundred students, it can be hard to get them outdoors. The solution? Bring the outdoors in by building ecosystems within our classroom!
Soon we'll have even more going on as students build aquaponic ecosystems to learn about the nitrogen cycle, which will house mosquito fish and be used to grow plants with fish waste.
To help control algae in the systems, I want to give students the option of adding pond snails; which will also help students learn how small changes to an ecosystem can have large impacts. Students will also be able to add aquatic plants like duckweed and, using our new clipboards, collect daily data on their systems. In addition, your donation will allow us to add a hissing cockroach habitat to our invertebrate zoo.
With our dry-erase easel, students will be able to easily sign up for jobs that maintain our classroom ecosystems such as cutting up beetle food, testing the pH of our garden, and conducting water quality testing on our trout tank. We will also be able to take our easel with us to a local lake when we release our trout so students can tally how many they release.
Your donation will help continue to make science come alive in our classroom and allow students to engage in daily hands-on data collection. Not only will this help students learn to appreciate nature and our local natural resources, but it will also allow students to feel part of something larger than themselves.
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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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 Ms. Holland and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
