Interactions Newsletter
The Ontario Journal of Environmental Education
The mission of OSEE is to support and inspire educators teaching
environmental education in Ontario
Volume 27, Number 3 www.osee.ca April 2015
Don’t miss out on our exciting conference:
Monday May 11 2015
9:00am – 5:00pm
Jack Smythe Field Centre &
Terra Cotta Conservation Area
Terra Cotta ON
CONTENTS
Ellen Murray
Media and the Environment
– A list of useful web resources
Astrid Steele
Global Warming? I Don’t Think So
– How can it be so cold if the planet is warming?
Sherri Owen
Nature Collection Frames
– A lesson plan combining art and a sense of place
EcoLinks 2015
This year’s annual conference is shaping up to be an inspiring day of action-based learning. A wide variety of interactive workshops, offered in the beautiful outdoors and the classroom, will provide educators with new skills and ideas for bringing environmental education into their daily teaching practice. To make this year’s conference more accessible to educators, OSEE has partnered with the Peel District School Board Field Centres and Credit Valley Conservation. These organisations have generously provided a site for the conference, letting us significantly reduce the conference fee. The $60 conference fee includes lunch, refreshments, and membership to OSEE for 2015-2106. Join us May 11, 2015 in Terra Cotta, Ontario for a memorable learning adventure!
Media and the Environment
Looking for inspiration or support with school environmental projects? These online resource will
- Educators with a dream of funding a project can get help from the MyClassNeeds Foundation, which is a registered charity. This organisation will put your project on their website so you can easily and legally crowd-fund a project. They also help with the sourcing and delivery of specialized equipment.
- Many of us are looking for more apps that provide education with entertainment. Check out Apps That Challenge Kids to Solve Environmental Problems. I am unsure that implying environmental problems can be fixed by clicking buttons in a game is helpful, but I like the ideas behind thinking about prevention and solutions to human-made problems. As well, I believe it is crucial for kids to understand that we can prevent or solve environmental problems if we try.
- For teachers going outdoors for Daily Physical Activity, the National Geographic website has easy to implement ideas for kindergarten to grade 3 with the cardinal directions, land, water and animals on a map, and places in the park. Spring is the season of flooding rivers so physical geography concepts about river water flow, dam building and its effects are covered in the National Geographic lesson at Rivers and the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Project for grades 6-8 social studies.
- There is always a plethora of amazing teaching resources available online, but as a classroom teacher I always lack time to dig for the resources that best fit with my curriculum. Below are some of my recent favourites. The federal government has some amazing videos hidden away. They range in length from about 5 to 20 minutes and almost all come with a complete script and some even have a Teacher Resource guide with discussion questions and curriculum connections. The video categories are:
- Earthtones
- Ocean Scientists
- Defence Science
- First Scientists
- Greenspeak
- Declic Techno-Science
- Science is Benefiting You
- International Polar Year
- Climate Change Adaptation
- Science at the Frontline
- From Science to Sustainability: Sea Scallops in the Maritimes
- Ocean Monitoring of the Canadian West Coast
Many of these videos are a fabulous fit for secondary geography teachers such as the Geological Mapping video about topography complete with an easy to use junior and senior sample lesson. There is a video about mining with a junior lesson about noise and a secondary lesson that has students using maps and debating a local proposed project. Another video covers the Geological Survey of Canada and covers groundwater and how to study it. There are also four videos featuring First Nations projects and knowledge.The Canadian Museum of Science and Technology has Edu-kits with superb hands-on materials for all grade levels but there is a $129 rental cost for a month. The secondary school Alternative Energy and Green Vehicle Technology kit has equipment for four modules on basic electricity, electric motors and combustion engines, making a biofuel, and a working fuel cell. There are extensive teaching materials useful for Grade 9 science or Grade 11 environmental science.
- For younger students, brine shrimp, also known as sea monkeys, make excellent open-ended research subjects. A commercial site has a great description of how to explore with and care for these organisms in a grade 1- 4 class but I recommend using Boreal to order them for about $15. Doing the more complex experiments will require an aquarium and pump, but the simple experiments can be done with plastic containers. Since spring is the season when eggs usually hatch, this allows a change from chicken egg discussions.
Remember for all ages just getting out in nature, with the sky, air and soil as our three walls, is good for our hearts and heads in so many ways. So enjoy spring and integrating environmental education messages into your curriculum.
Global Warming? I Don’t Think So
After the winter we’ve had here in Ontario, its no wonder that skepticism about global warming persists. Thirty below and mountains of snow don’t inspire confidence in those ivory tower scientists who we might picture glued to their computer screens sifting through reams of data and creating climate models with no basis in the world outside their windows. What a disconnect!
The cover of the latest issue of National Geographic proclaims the disconnect with the headline: The War on Science. Of course climate change is one of the topics, and the author writes:
“Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about (scientists’ consensus on climate change) or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the most powerful Republican voices on environmental matters, has long declared global warming a hoax.
The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another. It’s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.”(1)
Well, its not just the Climate Change Denial Industry that is having an impact on public opinion. The weather itself, here in mid-Canada and U.S.A. has been really, well…cool. Last summer our canoe trip saw temperatures in the single digits…8˚C in August! with a cold north wind to boot. Global Warming? I don’t think so.
But here’s the thing… As environmental educators we encourage our students to experience the moment – to feel the wind on their faces, listen to the sounds around them, and immerse themselves in the natural world. As human beings we tend to live in the present, with the result that our individual and collective memories can be fickle – we pick and choose what we want to remember – we rely on anecdotes and stories to create our personal histories.
Please don’t misunderstand – I believe that oral traditions and oral histories are incredibly rich and important sources of information, but there are some instances in which it is worthwhile to attend to what scientists have to tell us, based on data carefully and systematically collected and analyzed. I recently came across a fascinating report prepared by Scott Sutherland of The Weathernetwork, based on data from NASA and the GISS. The colour images amazed me, but unfortunately they do not copy well into black and white print so I urge you to look them up at the url listed in the footnotes(2). Let me describe the one that most impressed me:
Based on climate data from 1951 to 1980, the average temperature anomalies for 2014 are displayed on a map of the world, with bright orange showing areas that experienced up to 4 celsius degrees above the 30 year average, and blue areas that experienced up to 4 celsius degrees below the average. Almost all of North America, except Alaska and the West Coast are in the blues!!! We are getting cooler! and the only other places on the planet experiencing that trend are small areas in southwestern Africa and and a portion of the Antarctic coast. The rest of the global map is orange (South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Antarctica, and all of the oceans) and bright orange (northern Europe, China, Alaska, and parts of the northern polar region).
The article doesn’t say why the cooling trend in North America is occurring, but from what we know of climate patterns, it likely has to do with land masses, air masses and ocean currents. Hopefully someone will offer a plausible explanation soon. But what really struck me, as I studied the maps, was the irony of the temperature trends – most of the U.S.A and Canada, both developed countries with high living standards, are actually experiencing the effects of their high carbon emissions through cooling trends. No wonder skepticism abounds and we are hesitant to make huge changes in our lifestyles. And as a nation, we are wealthy enough to ride out some of the climate chaos that we are experiencing.
Not so for our less developed neighbours around the world, who are seeing desertification, deforestation, loss of ocean life and resources…and the terrible tragedies unfolding as thousands of refugees flee from wars over oil. A lust for oil seems to lie at the heart of all of it; The rise in carbon emissions, the incredible changes in global temperature can all be traced back to the beginning of the industrial revolution that was, and still is, fed by oil. And as a country we are unabashed consumers of oil – in its many forms. We have truly created the very climate that we complain about.
The science of global warming is clear and robust – but it is a big picture that we just aren’t experiencing day to day in our own little worlds. It’s a tough question: How can we overcome our myopic disconnect with the natural world? …a question with which environmental educators continue to grapple.
End Notes
(1) http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/science-doubters/achenbach-text
Nature Collection Frames
In the past, when the bulk of human knowledge was infinitesimally small compared to now, amateur scientists could make significant contributions to science. These hobby-researchers would travel and observe, recording the sights and sounds and experiences of the wild world around them. And, they would bring back all kinds of stuff. Eggs, skins, feathers, shells, wings, bones, and whole specimens jarred, stuffed, dried, pressed, boxed and all other manner of preserved states. Charles Darwin is probably the most famous of these naturalists and he amassed an enormous collection. Each collection was a representation of the place from which it came. Sadly, much of the collecting in that time involved killing huge numbers of flora and fauna; at times contributing to the extinction of the species being studied. While it is not possible to condone the mass killing, I do feel a nostalgic attachment to the reverent act of collection and display of natural objects.
Collecting seems to be an instinctive act for many people, especially children. This project is intended to provide a reusable format for students to display collections of natural objects. When the collection is limited to a specific area, it cannot help but become a representation of that place. The plants and rocks and soil and bits of animal sign that are collected will be a visual display of the ecotone. Including test tubes containing the coloured tested samples means the chemical profile of the area can be included. By having students make collections in nearby but ecologically diverse areas, the differences and commonalities can be displayed quickly. What species do the areas have in common? Which are different? Are there correlations between the species present and the chemical makeup of soil or water?
I hope that these instructions inspire you to try this out for yourself and your class.
Materials
|
Item |
Source |
|
Paint Stir Sticks (8 sticks per frame) |
Any store that sells paint. Ask for a donation |
|
White Glue/Carpenter’s Glue |
Hardware or craft store |
|
Chicken Wire (metal or plastic) |
Hardware store or farm supply |
|
Small Hand Drill or Awl |
Hardware store, garage sale, second hand store Make an awl from a piece of dowel with a nail hammered into one end and ground down to ¼” length. |
|
Size 5” screws (16 to 20/frame) |
Hardware store |
|
Screw drivers |
Hardware store |
|
Wire (small gauge) |
Hardware or craft store |
|
Scissors |
|
|
String or twine |
Hardware store or Craft store |
|
Glass/plastic vials |
Dollar store or Craft store or amazon.ca |
|
Wire cutters |
Hardware store |
|
Water and/or Soil Testing Kit |
Available online through science supplies websites. See end of article for more information |
|
Small vials |
Available at craft stores or amazon.ca. |
Instructions – click for full-size
Teacher Resources
Looking for ideas to green your lessons? Check out these great resources below for a plethora of amazing ideas and activities!