Hubbard Brook Research Foundation

Migratory Bird Unit released!

Mystery Migratory Birds of the White Mountains: Here in the Summer, Where in the Winter? This is the title of a new educational unit developed by Sara Joncas, a biology education major, and professor Mary Ann McGarry, with the Center For The Environment at Plymouth State University. McGarry also serves as Director of Education for the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (HBRF), which has a mission to translate the science collected by the team of researchers working at the US Forest Service Hubbard Brook site, just up the road from Plymouth in Woodstock. The newly developed, hands-on, interdisciplinary lessons focus on four diverse migratory birds that spend part of the year in New Hampshire forests and part of the year south of the Tropic of Cancer.

The curricular activities are aligned with NH and national educational standards from a number of different disciplines, in addition to science. The activities will become part of the Smithsonian Institute’s, successful, multicultural, cross-disciplinary Bridging the Americas: Unidos por las Aves program. Elementary schools in New Hampshire will be partnered with schools at the other end of a bird’s migratory path in Central America. Just like the birds who migrate back and forth, the students at the different schools will send information and artwork north and south to one another. The New Hampshire students can talk about the birds nesting and raising young where there are plenty of plumb insects to fatten up on during our summers, while students from Nicaragua can talk about the birds’ unique habitat in their country. Together the students can share what they learn about the birds and their conservation issues. HBRF will help with translating the students’ letters into Spanish and with the costs of mailing packet of letters and artwork to partner schools. McGarry says she is excited “to offer K-12 schools both a way to educate kids about the woods out their back doors and integrate a meaningful globalization element to the curriculum while promoting environmental stewardship.”

Some of the learning objectives are for students to be able to:

- Describe why birds migrate:

- Observe and explain differences in climate, culture, and geography between southern and northern migratory habitats of four bird species;

- Discover and share how birds are tracked and researched;

- Interpret trends from long-term monitoring data for migratory birds species;

- Identify possible causes for the decline of some migratory birds that visit the forests of northern New England; and

- Appreciate how parts of forest ecosystems are interdependent and complex and explain the importance of biodiversity in forest ecosystems

Joncas and McGarry piloted the activities they created in two seventh grade classes of teacher Michelle Jutras’ at Campton Elementary School and in three sixth grade classes at Plymouth Elementary School with teacher Sara Sanborn. The middle school students were busy examining a mist net used to temporarily capture birds so they can be banded and tracked, making observations about bird habitat needs, and conducting a simulated transect to collect, identify, and graph data about the presence of insects the birds find in the forests. The birds start arriving in New Hampshire around the second week of May.

For anyone interested in learning more about the migratory birds, Hubbard Brook Research Foundation is sponsoring a Migratory Bird Symposium for educators on the evening of May 9^th at Plymouth State University and a follow-up teacher workshop at Plymouth Regional High School the morning of May 10^th. Visit the HBRF website at hubbardbrookresearch.org to learn more and register for either or both programs.

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Exploring Acid Rain teaching guide

The Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (HBRF) recently released Exploring Acid Rain, the first teaching guide developed to accompany the Science Links publication Acid Rain Revisited.

Exploring Acid Rain was developed by HBRF Education Staff with the help of an advisory group of eight teachers from the Upper Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire. These teachers were invaluable in providing us with ideas as to what material would be most useful to them in a teaching guide. These teachers also participated in a pilot teacher workshop and assisted us in identifying the most important facets of the guide to include in a workshop.

EAR was introduced to a group of teachers and administrators at the North Country Professional Development Day in Whitefield, NH on October 5, 2007. Teachers received a CD containing the complete teaching guide which includes many resources, including lessons, activities, slideshows and GLOBE protocols for acid rain fieldwork. Teachers were also invited to participate in our Feedback Initiative, which entails using pieces of the teaching guide and reporting on challenges and successes in the classroom. Teachers’ first hand experiences will allow us to gain value feedback so that we can make revisions and improvements to the guide as necessary, and it will also allow teachers to communicate with each other as they teach about acid rain. All teachers can comment on entries.

The second Exploring Acid Rain teachers’ workshop was held at Plymouth State University on January 18, 2008. Featured components of this workshop included a presentation by Dr. Steve Kahl, Director of the Center for the Environment (CFE) at PSU, co-author on the EPA report to Congress of the impact of the Clean Air Act Amendments, and biogeochemist who has monitored acid rain for 25+ years, and a tour of the CFE environmental research lab, co-managed by Adam Baumann.

Teacher participants from both workshops have been invited to receive stipends for sharing their reactions, implementation ideas, questions and more on this blogsite. To read these reactions, click on the “Reactions to teacher workshops” category to the right.

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Why this blogsite?

One of the goals of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation is to use the research that comes out of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study to develop a series of Teaching Guides that will help secondary educators teach about complex environmental issues through classroom activities and outdoor student fieldwork. Feedback is vital to our achievement of this goal, and we value any and all of your comments. In order to encourage teachers to use a piece or pieces of this teaching guide, we have implemented a stipend system as described here. We would like to be clear that we value ALL feedback, not just positive reviews. We know that, in general, teachers are a frank and honest group who demand high quality resources. We hope that you will be frank and honest with us so that we can deliver the best quality material possible.

We also hope that this blogsite will serve to promote professional development among educators, and that you will benefit from reading the experiences that other teachers have with this guide and vice-versa. Again, all comments are welcome and need not pertain solely to scientific content. Experiences with logistics, students with different learning modalities and/or special needs, equipment acquisition…anything in relation to a teacher’s use with this guide will benefit others as well as HBRF as we strive to create teaching guides that contribute to environmental and ecological literacy.