It is important for you to be thinking about travelling into the field with your students to collect data

Spring is upon us! The skies are filled with groups of Grackles and Red-winged Blackbirds, American Woodcocks have begun displaying in local fields, Chipmunks are emerging from their winter slumbers and the occasional Turkey Vulture soars overhead. Perhaps, more importantly, deciduous plants that lay dormant over the winter are beginning to allocate resources to this year’s set of leaves. Invasive plants, such as Morrow’s Honeysuckle have already started leaf-out at Manomet HQ in Plymouth! A milder winter is probably going to result in earlier leaf-out than last year. Thus, it is important for you to be thinking about travelling into the field with your students to collect data. It looks like late April will be ideal for measuring your first (pre-leaf-out) data at Eastern MA field sites.

This year, you will be the ones leading these field sessions, so it is imperative that you understand the techniques and rationale for the data you are collecting. The combination of the protocols, instructional videos and recorded webinars will provide you with the information you need to master the techniques and relate them to the curriculum. Be sure to check out each video on our YouTube Channel.

We are creating a series of teacher notes based on some of the students’ learning difficulties that we’ve become aware of from Climate Lab teachers, from our own observations and from the pre/post-tests from last year. The first few have been posted in the materials and resource page of the Climate Lab website. We have also posted a series of PowerPoints for each lesson of the one-week curriculum. They are not intended to be complete presentations, but rather a foundation that can be used to build whatever presentations you need. Not everybody will use PowerPoint in teaching this unit, but for those who do, this should make the process of putting them together easier. In particular, these might be useful for visual accompaniment to the activities that are currently lecture-based.

Instead of a webinar, this month’s professional development session will be a ‘call-in’ day, where you can contact me with any questions or feedback you may have. I’ll be available all day from 9am-5pm Tuesday, March 29th. Feel free to email or call me with any questions or feedback you may have.

If you have not done so, be sure to tell up when you are going to be teaching the curriculum, and the two times you plan on taking your students into the field to collect data. We hope to see Climate Lab in action this spring in the classroom and in the field!

It is also not too late to trim a few branches for the in-class collaborative Twigs Project. Let me know if you are interested ASAP.

As always, please feel free to direct your questions and feedback to Evan Dalton at Manomet. Thank you all for your continued support! (edalton@manomet.org).

All the best,

Evan and the rest of the Climate Lab Team