WVFA Mountain State Forestry Summer 2020

P R O J E C T L E A R N I N G T R E E 18 West Virginia Forestry Association Mountain State Forestry  | Summer 2020 www.wvfa.org THE DRIVE DOWN TO THE RIVER is pleasant with the windows rolled up and music blaring to drown out the sound of traffic, an ice-cold beverage in the cupholder to beat the heat. The river is now in view...or what was the river. Now it’s only a wasteland, full of trash, unwanted debris, and murky water. Time to go back home, this trip is a total bust, even the fish won’t swim here. But where is the city? Instead of the metropolis that was there when the trip began, now there is only a thick swampy grey with a faint shadow of a highrise here and there. This may seem like the story nightmares are made of, but this in fact was the reality of many cities, water sources and landscapes in the 60s and 70s. Los Angeles was nothing more than a ghost of itself hidden behind smog and pollution, the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland, OH was so badly polluted it caught fire, and litter made its home everywhere and anywhere. In response to the growing concerns about the health of the environment, environmental professionals and formal educators came together over many years and in 1976 created a curriculum called “Project Learning Tree” that would allow students to address these concerns. The PLT curriculum utilizes hands on interdisciplinary activities to connect students to the outdoors both inside, and outside of the classroom. Highly adaptable to multiple audiences and correlated to most educational standards around the United States, PLT’s lessons are geared towards teaching critical thinking so students learn “how to think, not what to think.” Now move ahead a few decades to today… a group of fourth grade students are exploring the wooded area adjacent to their school grounds. Their teacher reminds them to look underneath leaves, stones, and rotting logs for evidence they may miss. Geared with magnifying lenses and clipboards in hand, students see which group can find the most evidence of decomposers. “Look I found a bug rolled into a ball!” exclaims one student. While one child uses a digital camera to take pictures of the bug and the area around it, another student sketches a picture of their find, while another looks on an identification sheet to determine that the bug is a pill bug. After twenty minutes, the teacher calls the class together to review what each student team found in the woods. This lesson is part of a class unit on Life Science, and the activity is from Project Learning Tree’s PreK-8 Environmental Education Activity Guide. Truth is, trees can be used to teach a whole range of subjects—math, social studies, history, science, reading and writing. They provide a window into much broader discussions about the environment as a whole: land, air, and water, and how all are interconnected. Sowing the Seeds of Stewardship Project Learning Tree ® (PLT) is more than an activity guide. It is a comprehensive national environmental education program led by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative ® Inc., an independent, non-profit organization that advances sustainability through its work in standards, conservation, community, and education. SFI collaborates with the forest sector, brand owners, conservation groups, resource professionals, landowners, educators, local communities, Indigenous The sun is out, it’s the weekend and nothing sounds better than a day out on the water in a kayak...