Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 5, Wildlife Ecology (5th-6th)
On our final day of class, we started by going around the room sharing our favorite part of the week. Several of them said their favorite thing this week was making new friends. We then got to work, and I shared the results of the community survey. You’ll recall that yesterday we talked about surveys and came up with some questions. Your child may have brought home a copy of the survey results which were helpful when writing the final report (poster). We reviewed the other sources of information we gathered this week and they were reminded that they needed to reference at least two sources, and we got to work. This may be the first time they have created an informative poster so they needed a lot of coaching on what one includes in an Introduction and Research Results. They knew what to put in the Solutions section but had a hard time distilling the topic and research into brief coherent statements. Some of them had a slow start but ultimately figured it out. I hope you like their final product. We had some interesting proposals. Before lunch, they had time to do some final computer searches and after lunch, it was time to put it all together. Their task was to use the information we had gathered to come up with a solution the problem of deer overpopulation. They put together their mini-posters and presented to the class. They did a pretty good job talking to the audience and not simply reading their poster. Ask them what they thought of the process of gathering information and putting together the poster. Do they recognize that this is a succinct way to present information? Do they feel they know a lot more about deer and how to control deer populations? They should know why it’s important to control deer populations. If you would like to extend their learning, I suggest the following resources:
The Ecology page on the HHMI BioInteractive website… (check out the wildlife overpasses page)
I enjoyed being your child’s science camp teacher and educating them on the world of ecology. Thank you for sharing them with us and I hope they enjoyed their week at SAVY.