Hi Mary Anne!
I was so excited and happy to ready your latest post about collaboration. My biggest hurdle to doing place based science is to get my students down to the ocean. We live upcountry, about 8 miles away. My mission is to find us a way to get down there.
I have submitted a grant and am very hopeful that it will be funded. It will allow us to take a field trip to the ocean, to a natural land preserve that is an old fishpond used by the Hawaiians many years ago. There is a stream that runs through the property too.
I am devloping curriculum to share with the Pribilov Island schools dealing with collecting phytoplankton and zooplankton. My students will first compare and contrast the mo'olelo (folk tales used to explain natural events) with the scientific method. Then they will draw phytoplankton using Ernst Haeckels work as an example (scientific illustration) because my students are such artists! Then we will make nets (out of nylon stocking and/or paint strainers) and develop a protocol for collection and ID of phytoplankton/zooplankton. Then we will go visit the site and collect specimens. Then we will start ID to make a database of plankton in the near shore environment of Maui.
My students will all have their own nets. We can do the collection for the rest of the year and swap pictures of what we found and communicate our findings. I am dedicating a blog space (oneoceanonearth.blogspot.com) as a place for us all to virtually meet and share.
I also want to send a culture crate to all of the 'sistah schools.' The crate will have items, CDs, stuff that my Hawaiian students (and others) deem as culturally significant towards having others know more about them.
So the first few steps are in motion. The initial curriculum (to write a mo'olelo and study the scientific method) are being done now. The drawing comes next week. Another lesson on using satelites as a tool to doing science in remote areas, is also being crafted. My grant is submitted and I am crossing my fingers it will be funded.
Does this sound good? Let me know and we can collaborate! We can do so much more too (like with water evaporation). The food rotting thang is kinda a thumbs down. You can guess where food would rot the fastest, ya?
warmly,
Maggie (and her students)