River of Words flows with BioSITE!

I know we all are amazed at what young minds can create! If you are interested in having a special- River of Words Day- in your classroom- let's see what we can create!! The inspiring student creations will be a special part of our BioSITE 2010 Open House. See the link below to find out more, and contact Sandy if you want to plan something special for your class.



River of Words
Teaching Poetry to Young People

Milkweed Editions and River of Words have created a free, downloadable teaching guide to help teachers and students learn to write great poetry.

Written by Louisiana master teachers Harriet Maher and Connie MacDonald (2006 River of Words Teacher of the Year), this full-color, 75-page guide, which uses the River of Words anthology River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things as a text, will help students get beyond pre-conceived notions about poetry, inhibitions and fears, excessive reliance on rhyme, and the thorny host of other impediments to creativity and expression that a poetry assignment often invokes.

Connie and Harriet have created a fun, investigatory, challenging set of classroom activities that we hope will help you to inspire your students to explore both their "inner" worlds and the complicated, endlessly fascinating "outer" world around them.

Find out more about River Of Words here.

Time to sign up for STEP!

STEP – The Salmon and Trout Education Program is a thematic curriculum designed to enable a teacher to provide students with information about our native salmon and steelhead populations.

STEP Training will provide the teacher with:
• focus of life cycles, habitat preservation, water conservation, and use of natural resources
• field experience in a local stream ecosystem
• ways to create a successful program in the classroom
• a copy of the K-12 STEP curriculum (includes alignment with State Science Standards)
certification for classroom incubation.

CEU credits available

Besides an incredible training, you also get to walk away with your self-made aquaviewer and fishprint T-shirt! Science Resource Kits available for nominal charge (includes CD’s, DVD’s, slide displays, poster)

Registration form can be found here or contact sderby@cdm.org.

Wonderful Wildflowers Now Has A Slideshow

Fall rains mean that the conditions are right to get your wildflower seed started! Wonderful Wildflowers is an activity that will help teach students about the importance of plants, and especially native plants, to our ecosystem. Your students will create their own wildflower seed packets which they can fill with a few spoonfuls of soil and a few pinches of wildflower seed to scatter at home or school.

Winter and early spring are the best times to sew wildflower seed, so you have plenty of time to plan for this activity. Wonderful Wildflowers would also be a great rainy day activity.

New this year, we have a short powerpoint slideshow that you can share with your students to help introduce this activity. Click on these links to access and download your Wonderful Wildflower materials: Instructions , Envelope , Slideshow

Have fun!

ACE Teachers - For Your Eyes Only

Dear ACE teachers,

I am so glad you have made it here to check out the info for the BioSITE ACE program and to schedule your lessons. Please note that the right side of this blog page is full of helpful information for you, including links to see the offerings for both the morning class lessons and the afternoon field visits.

Once you have decided which lessons you would like to schedule, there is also a link in the right column that will take you to Doodle to sign up. Please sign up by November 1, 2010. The earlier you schedule your visits, the more likely you are to get your first choice time slots. If you do not schedule your BioSITE ACE lessons by November 1, I will contact you to assign you your time slots.

I am really looking forward to working with you to immerse your students in enriching, hands-on science experiences. Thanks to you and your students, I know this is going to be a great BioSITE year!

NEW..EEI Teacher resources on the web...

This came across my desk...so now on to you!

The Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) Curriculum

Famed naturalist John Muir captured the vital importance of education about the environment when he said, "Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe." Imagine the possibilities if that understanding began, for students, as early as Kindergarten and continued through high school. With the Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) Curriculum, that vision is well on the way to becoming a reality.

Field-tested in Kindergarten to 12th grade classrooms from San Diego to California's North Coast, the 85 EEI Curriculum units cover selected academic content standards in both Science and History-Social Science. Each EEI Curriculum unit is designed to teach one or more standards to mastery.

A link for each grade level, and check out the materials. Great CA maps! Biodiversity, natural regions and peoples, water.......good stuff:-)

Go to: http://www.calepa.ca.gov/Education/EEI/Curriculum/Default.htm#CurriculumUnits

STEP 2011

As many of you know- STEP (Salmon and Trout Education Program) is a great companion program for the BioSITE experience. Every year, new teachers come on board- they complete an amazing two day training over in Santa Cruz, and then they are able to incubate steelhead eggs (from the eyed egg stage to fry stage)in their classrooms- linking fish life science to their field experiences! This year the training is expected to be in February (not the MLK weekend as in the past) but the exact date has not been set yet.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in......the best way to get the latest info is to email hmiller334@aol.com.

Teacher Trainings

Thank you to all of our new Teachers who were able to be here last Saturday. We had a great day!
Our next training day is set for October 23rd, here at CDM, from 10 - 3. This is for all Teachers. We will spend the morning expanding on the BioSITE curriculum and exploring ways to integrate BioSITE into the classroom and enrich the experience for our students. We will provide a yummy lunch and the finish the day with a share and tell of resource kits and materials. You can sign up for kits- and we hope to make sure our ACE teachers are completing their field days sign ups.
Please RSVP so we can make the lunch count and plan for materials!! I will send out more details on Oct 15th.
See you soon.

BioSITE 2011....Here we go again!!!!!!

Just a quick enthusiastic message for all.......we have another BioSITE year ahead and I think it is going to be an amazing year. We have the best of the past years to guide us and we have new adventures on the horizon. Thanks for being a part of the experience-- and let's work together to change the way our students are learning and growing! Be the change you want to see in the world!
Sandy

Hi! I'm Marianne and I recently joined the BioSITE staff. I'm so excited to be a part of this awesome program. I can't wait to meet all the wonderful teachers who get their students involved in investigating their environment.

I moved to the South Bay from Austin, Texas, but I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have worked both as a classroom teacher and an environmental educator. I love being near the water and teaching students outdoors. I am looking forward to a fabulous BioSITE year with you and your students!

Neighborhood Creeks Meet and Greet

Neighborhood Creeks Meet and Greet
Join us to gather and grow our watershed community!

With special Guest Erick Burres:
Citizen Monitoring Coordinator of the California Clean Water Team

When: June 22, 2010 5-7 pm
Location: Roosevelt Community Center, 901 E. Santa Clara St. 95116

Wondering about your Watershed? The City of San Jose wants to help you find out! We’re starting up water quality monitoring programs for citizens and students, and seeking volunteers for World Water Monitoring Day in September.
Come find out what it takes to start up a monitoring project from special guest Erick Burres. See what’s going on in San Jose’s watersheds and learn how to get involved.

For more information, contact Carol Boland, email carol.boland@sanjoseca.gov or phone (408) 277-2697

Extra BioSITE ACE Day if you're willing to be a guinea pig

* Do you and your students want one more BioSITE classroom visit this year?

*Would you be interested in exploring more parts of our watershed virtually using high-resolution panoramic photographs on the computer?

*Do you have a relatively small class? (closer to 20 than 30)

*Do you have 30-60 min of classroom time available between 9am and 1pm on a Wed or Thur in May?

There are many parts of the watershed that we'd like to take students to investigate, but don't always get the chance. As a result, we've been taking large-format digital panoramas of some of them for use in the program. We're working up a new lesson using these photographs to further explore our watershed that I can bring into classrooms on our museum laptops. No network access is required.

Contact me at biosite.river@gmail.com if you're interested in helping us test out this lesson. I can schedule the first three interested classes in May. Thanks!

If you want to explore one of the online example photos, here's a shot of Guadalupe Creek in the fog near where it starts on the slopes of Mt. Umunhum.

Double-click on a part of the panorama to zoom, drag it to move around, or click on one of the snapshots at the bottom to see where it is located in the bigger picture. This one's online, so it may take a minute or two to load fully.


You can use the controls to zoom in and examine quite a bit of detail -- one fun activity on this particular panorama is to see how many different spiderwebs students can find. We've taken snapshots of a few of them, but are sure you can find others!

ACE Day 2 Lesson Outline

For those of you who have upcoming ACE Day 2 field trips, here is the outline of the lesson. We're looking forward to seeing all of you out at the river!

Wonderful Wildflowers

New Plant Restoration Activity Now Available

The "Wonderful Wildflowers" activity will give your students the chance to help restore California native plants to our local landscape. With this activity your students will learn why native plants are important and then have the chance to plant some of their own! After folding and decorating their own seed envelopes, students will place a few spoonfulls of soil mixture into their envelope then add a pinch of local wildflower seed to take home and plant.

This activity comes with background information and instructions for teachers, an envelope-making sheet to photocopy for each student, and a small bag of wildflower seed. We can provide a bag soil mix (pictured) or you can use your own (you will need about 3-4 cups total).

Late winter and early spring are the best times to sow wildflower seed. Please let us know if you would like this activity for your classroom!

River of Words Workshop

River of Words Workshop- Retreat


This workshop is designed especially for you!
Revitalize your teaching by revitalizing yourself!

Where: Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
When: February 27, 2010
Time: 9 am – 4 pm with Lunch provided
Fee: $65.00

Included: * A 270-page “Watershed Explorers Educators’ Guide” (K-12) designed to build multiple literacies and to help students develop an informed "sense of place."
* Children’s Discovery Museum’s BioSITE (Students Investigating Their Environment) Environmental Science Curriculum for High School- Elementary Service Learning Program.

RSVP: By 2/1/2010
To Sandy Derby- 408.298-5437 x261
sderby@cdm.org
Details will follow RSVP

Facilitated by Pamela Michael, ROW executive director and co-founder

River of Words® (ROW) is a nature-based science, art and poetry program created to promote watershed awareness, literacy and the arts. Through our annual youth art and poetry contest and educator's tools, River of Words helps young people explore the natural and cultural history of their own communities.

The River of Words (ROW) workshop provides K-12 educators (classroom teachers and other non-formal educators) with ideas and inspiration for integrating nature exploration and the arts into core subject areas like science and math, social studies, and language arts.

Explore creek ecology and the natural and cultural history of the area's watershed, combined with a study of the "art of creeks” and the “language of landscape”
Learn to inspire nature-based art and poetry
Learn about your watershed and bioregion
Make and take your own journal
Explore new resources, from videos to books and websites
Inspire and spark students' imagination and sense of wonder

Retreat Reflect Revitalize