Summer SAVY, Session 3 Day 5, “Plants & Pollen: Exploring Agricultural Engineering” (1st-2nd)
Today, we started our day together by selecting a few books on pollinators and reading them in the shade outside. We wrote down our top three facts and then shared them with a friend. For a fun brain break, we played Garden Bingo and won bee stickers for our prizes.
We returned to our main story, Mariana Becomes a Butterfly and learned about how to find balance in our natural system and that we can use the Integrated Pest Management (system) to help solve problems by using nature.
The Buzz on Bees: Why Are They Disappearing by Shelley Rotner helped us start our conversation about the dangers pollinators face daily. We also watched a video that explained the top reasons for their decline, which include:
- Urbanization
- Changes to farming practices
- Cultivated forms of flowers no longer resemble ancestral forms and are sometimes inappropriate for bees because they have trouble foraging from them.
- Bees only store food for a few days, and when flowers are scarce, they can’t find food.
- Poor foraging weather
- Insects need nectar-rich plants all year (especially bumblebees). If there are not enough nectar-rich plants available, there is a reduced survival rate for these insects to be able to pollinate other plants.
Thankfully, we learned there are things that we can do to help ensure we continue to have healthy populations of pollinators. Students engaged in a hands-on activity that focused on ways we can help pollinators by making clay beads with pansy seeds mixed in to take home and plant. Did you know that pansies are a vital flower to have for pollinators?
By the end of the day, we used our knowledge of pollination, our understanding of the properties of materials provided, and the Engineering Design Process to design and improve a hand pollinator for a model flower. Students asked, imagined, planned, created, and improved their hand pollinator designs.
We played Insect Bingo together, which was a hit! The “prize” for all participants was creating unique pollinator bookmarks to take home. We ended our time together by learning about Monarch butterflies and their great migration and made puddling stakes for butterflies out of air-drying clay that can be placed in your garden once dried.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to teach your child! I hope that they continue to love pollinators and plants and learn how they can find ways to help our pollinator populations.
– Janette Geasley
