My students need chart tablets, a new laptop computer, macroinvertebrate sets, and oxygen kits to study the pond under the ice, record findings, and submit them on the laptop to GLOBE.
Imagine you are in the middle of New York City. That is all you have grown up with - buildings and concrete. Then imagine, in the middle of this cityscape, you are taken to a green park, led to a pond where you can get down and dirty, find tiny critters and explore whether this pond is healthy.
This is an urban school.
My students are city dwellers. They have few opportunities to explore parks and ponds. Never before have these particular students had the opportunity to do chemical testing of their environment. My students, with your help, will now have the opportunity to do soil testing using the GLOBE protocol and, for the first time ever, we will be doing dissolved oxygen testing of the water while we are visiting these ponds. These children will have the opportunity to act, record and submit real data to the GLOBE website to be shared with scientists, other students and international schools through the use of a laptop! My class is a very diverse group of learners. We encompass English Language Learners, Special Needs and all levels of General Education. Our students are excited, curious and amazed at what can be found in their own neighborhood's ponds and parks!
My Project
My students never realized the relationships between what is growing in the ponds in their own neighborhood. Their first reactions have been "Oh, It's so dirty" and "I have to get messy!" They usually predict that this must be a polluted pond because of all the green and brown "stuff" growing underwater and "it smells bad". But once they start collecting their specimens, the excitement grows on their faces and they do not want to leave the ponds! Then we begin to look at the pollution tolerability of the organisms and, so far, we have found every pond we have visited in our city is healthy. Your resources will allow our students to learn more about these organisms, their life cycles and their habitats. This year, we would like to go in a new direction and study how much dissolved oxygen is in the water. We would also like, for the first time, to visit the ponds in the winter to test the level of dissolved oxygen in the water under the ice. My students need chart tablets, macroinvertebrate sets and oxygen kits to study the pond in the winter under the ice, record findings and submit on the laptop to GLOBE.
With these funds, our students will have the experience to feel like scientists, perform chemical testing and observe as scientists do.
They will then be able to submit these findings to the international data base called GLOBE. Judging by the excitement we have already seen in these students, we are countering the boredom some have started to express about science and school. All of a sudden, these children beg to do more of this work. We have flamed their curiosity through joy of learning.
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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. Naveh and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.