Last week I took my 6th formers outside to do some fieldwork. Although the school is an inner city one, there is a surprisingly diverse band of scrub and rank vegetation around the edge of the school field, including gorse, hawthorn, elder, bramble, nettles and, believe it or not, bluebells. There are a number of mature trees scattered around, such as ash, field maple, oak, goat willow and a variety of more ornamental plantings like Lombardy poplar and cherry. There used to be more but half a dozen got cut down the other year because they blocked the sight lines of the then newly-installed security cameras, a great shame.
In reality, we counted dandelions, plantain and white clover because that was all they could recognize easily (after instruction) and it was all that was present in sufficient quantity to require quadratting to estimate numbers.
Whilst they were counting , I scanned the taller vegetation for anything interesting. Having read the bit on ladybirds in this months’ BBC Wildlife magazine, I was pleased to find a 2-spot ladybird. In my ignorance I thought I’d found a rarity, but the magazine told me it was ‘common and widespread’. Not in my garden, I’m sure I’ve only seen one on two or three occasions. I’ll certainly look more carefully in future.
Nathan will help me look, he’s interested in all things living, an interest I intend to fuel. At 20 months he’s already got a taxonomy system that would put most of those up to Linnaeus to shame. Two legs is a ‘quack-quack’, four legs is a ‘doggy’, six or more legs is a ‘spider’ unless it flies off, then it becomes a ‘bee’. Next stop, Cladistics Department at the Natural History Museum.
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2 comments:
i think it's great that you're doing such good things with kids (and a damned shame that trees--which were probably two hundred years old--got chopped down to make a line-of-sight for security cameras...ugh!).
it's good to get kids thinking about these kinds of things (i.e. their environment) at a young age.
i also think it's good to get kids thinking about real life issues (e.g. trees being chopped down to make room for cameras) at a young age. this world's gonna be their world, soon, so it's up to us to prepare them for it as best we can.
we need to build a generation of better citizens. keep up the good work.
--cid
cidViscous.blogspot.com
Nice work... keep it up. I used to draw and paint. Can't seem to get motivated to do it anymore. The only creative thing I seem to do now is poetry.
Great Site!
peg
www.haikuvenue.com
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