I will warn you ahead of time that this blog post may exceed the recommended length for blog post best practices. I hope you don’t mind, but, really, I should have posted a few times, because I’m sure I’ll forget something great and remember it later. I apologize in advance. It is also written about my experiences during the 2^nd week of the externship, which is when my wheels really started spinning about this curriculum piece I am to create. Enjoy!

Last week was a whirlwind of tours, data assessment, and more outdoors experiences that just proves that science is messy, sticky, sweaty, and, sometimes, downright dangerous! We started off our Monday with student tours from Governor’s School East. Considering we are giving a Daily Planet Talk next Thursday, it seemed good practice to start talking publicly about our experiences with the eMammal Project. Our postdoc, Dr. Stephanie Schuttler, introduced the program and then it was my turn to talk about the Reconyx camera and how we use it to capture images of animals who are unaware of being on caught on film. I will admit my first couple of times, I was grasping for straws and kept forgetting to ask students what triggered the camera. Thankfully, Stephanie was there to rescue me. By the fourth and final tour, I think we all had gotten the hang of it and were excited about getting to share our experience with these students.

While that was a highlight of the day, what really got my head spinning was when Stephanie showed us some of the data that has been collected with the eMammal project.   Considering that our task is to create lessons that we can use to get our students involved in Citizen Science with eMammal, collect data, and teach the NC Standard Course of Study in the process, my head was full of ideas of how we can use this data to teach practically any subject. Quite frankly, these thoughts have consumed me 24/7 all week and even here, while I am at the beach with my family, I am still constantly running ideas through my head trying to work out the best possible way to accomplish all that we have been tasked to do. It is EXCITING! I can’t wait for school to start in mid-August and get my students interested in what we might find just outside our classroom door!

Most of the ideas I have are centered upon the data we will have from our camera traps and other camera traps. On Wednesday, we had video conference with Tavis, who is a scientist who works on eMammal at the Smithsonian. He shared with us some eMammal projects in Washington, DC and Florida that have given us some pretty good ideas about what we can do with our Students Discover lesson plans. Between this discussion and our previous discussions with Stephanie, we have began exploring diversity indices such as the Shannon-Wiener Diversity Index and the Simpson Index of Diversity. Both incorporate math skills that would be valuable for our students and they also allow for us to create graphs that we can use for comparative studies, which is a major skill in the statistics strand of the math standards for 7^th grade.

Other data analyses that we plan to use are Species Richness and Evenness. What is really exciting about investing evenness in a habitat is that the calculation is done in the same way as finding the Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) which is another important 7^th grade standard! We really began feeling like we had hit the jackpot with this data analysis and it made us feel like we could get some really great lessons that could be useful by any 7^th grade math teacher in NC.

At this point, I felt so much better about the math lesson(s) that we are going to create, but as a certified art teacher, though not one in practice, I felt that we could go further and include a lesson that incorporates the arts. I checked out a few ideas with data displays and found a couple that could work with one example being a Treemap. You might think it would resemble a tree, but, no. In fact it looks more like a Matisse masterpiece with all the rectangles and color-coded sections. Again, I began to get excited because a treemap is really nothing more than a collection of area model rectangles, which is another skill that is part of the 7^th grade curriculum!

While I think the Treemap is a great idea, it isn’t that inspiring as students aren’t really creating original artwork. I explored further and happened upon a mention of Plein Air drawing. This literally means “drawing in plain air” and was first used by renaissance painters when they wandered out into nature to actually draw in plain air. I thought that while our students are choosing sites for the camera traps, they could record their surroundings by creating “plein air” drawings in their field notebooks. I then went a step further and thought about them incorporating the plants and wildlife they captured in topographical maps that are inspired by Google Earth images of our school campus and the surrounding neighborhood. Again, the possibilities seem endless!

Alas, I mentioned the outdoors in my introduction and I have yet to explain myself. Since you have stuck around this long, I will do you a favor and give you the short(er) version. On Wednesday morning, we were all awakened by our respective alarms around 4AM in order to be in place at the Prairie Ridge EcoStation at 5AM sharp. It was Small Mammal Trapping day! We accompanied, Lisa Gatens, Curator of Mammals at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, who was spending the week doing a capture/recapture study of the small mammals in three different fields. Small baited traps were set throughout these fields on a grid pattern of 10m apart. We checked the traps, collected the bait, and recorded data on the small mammals we found, if any. Out of 150 traps, our two teams found 23 small mammals. Most of which were small field mice or white cotton rats, which were not so small. It was a hot day, and we were trudging through some pretty tall (5ft!) grass, but the going was pretty easy, right on up to the point that we happened upon a rather large copperhead snake! Mamatha, a visiting teacher from India, was leading the way and we knew something was up when she startled and took a step back. Because of the very tall grasses, we were unable to see the length of the snake, but he was probably the largest copperhead I’ve ever seen without a thick sheet of glass between us. It was obvious that I was much more afraid of him than he of me. Still, I managed to get a photo of a bit of him through the grass. All in all, small mammal trapping was a lot of fun, and a great example of how real science doesn’t really fit the mold of preconceived notions that many people have.

There were many other exciting things that happened this week, like a visit from my daughter who spent many hours in the museum and now wants to be a scientist, and the tours we gave to the Students Discover groups from Knightdale high school, as well as a visit with the NC Environmental Education department, but I’ll save that for another post. Thanks for sticking with me and sharing in my fantastic Students Discover adventure!