Pollinator Posters

Looking for more information on our local pollinators? Mrs. Kromer’s third grade class has you covered! The students have prepared posters and brochures about honey bees and butterflies.

Honey Bees:

Logan's poster on Honey Bees

Bronson's Honey bee poster_1

Bronson's Honey Bee poster_2

Butterflies:

Sarah's Monarch Brochure_1 Sarah's Monarch Brochure_2

Rhema's Monarch poster

Sophia's butterfly poster_1 Sophia's butterfly poster_2

Special thank you to Logan, Bronson, Sarah, Rhema, and Sophia for sharing their informative posters and brochures with us!

You can also download these posters and brochures using these links:

Logan’s Informational Poster on Honey Bees

Bronson’s Informational Poster on Honey Bees

Sarah’s Monarch Butterfly Brochure

Rhema Informational Poster on Monarch Butterflies

Sophia’s Informational Poster on Butterflies

Recycled Life Cycles!

As the weather warms, we start seeing more butterflies fluttering from flower to flower! But where do butterflies come from? A long time ago, people thought butterflies came from soil. Mrs. Kromer’s third grade class knows better than that! To showcase the life cycle of butterflies, our third graders have created diagrams with recycled material found around their house.

RCAAS_Recycled life cycle

RCAAS_Recycled life cycle 2

Special thank you to William, Vincynt, Logan, and Ross for sharing their beautiful diagrams with us!

Planting pollinator gardens!

Happy Spring and Earth Week to all!

We care a lot about pollinators here at RCAAS! Pollinators are creatures that carry pollen from one flower to another, which allows that flower to develop into a seed. Sometimes those seeds are small, like sunflower seeds, or big, like a watermelon.

File:Cross pollination.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Unfortunately, pollinator populations are declining across the globe. Each year there are fewer butterflies and bees. This is a big problem because we need those insects to grow many different fruits and vegetables! Luckily, Mrs. Kromer’s third grade class is studying these pollinators and discovering ways we can help them!

Today we are sharing Sophia, Ross, and William’s pollinator garden designs! The gardens were designed after researching different native plants to understand how big they will get, how much sunshine they need, how much water they need, and what kind of pollinators they attract.

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These gardens are beautiful! Special thank you to our students who allowed us to share their designs!

William’s Garden Design

Ross’s Garden Design

Sophia’s pollinator garden

Third Graders Develop a Love for Pollinators

Written by 3rd grade teacher, Amy Kromer (pictured below with Caitlin, Emmy, Kade, and Ishan)

Each year my third grade students learn about the importance of pollinators. They love planning and planting gardens. They research various native plants to find out what types of pollinators they attract, the bloom time, and the height of each so they can design a garden that meets the needs of a variety of pollinators during the spring, summer, and fall.

My students learn to become Citizen Science Researchers. They develop a comparative research question such as:

Do butterflies like it when it’s hot or cold? Above or below 70 degrees F.

What color flowers do butterflies like?

What kind of pollinator is most commonly found at our garden on cloudy versus sunny days?

Are pollinators attracted to a special shape of flower?

Within small groups, students visit two different gardens to collect data, they make conclusions based on the data they collected, and they present this information to peers, parents, and other visitors.

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My third graders raise monarch butterflies every year, they learn how to identify male versus female, how to tag them, and record the data for Monarch Watch. They love being able to release them and watch they fly away.

For the past several years, students have shared what they learned about the importance of pollinators and plants that require pollination in order to thrive. They have ran a booth for the Earth Day Extravaganza at Osborne Park. The students showed children and adults how to make seed bombs using milkweed seed. They created perennial wildflower seed packets, sunflower seed packets, and informational brochures about pollinators for people to take. Students also planted giant sunflowers in egg shells that they decorated for the public to take and plant. They shared about topics such as: biotic versus abiotic pollination and host versus nectar plants.

This past summer, students helped plant a garden out at the Ohio Veteran’s Home which was funded by the Ohio Environmental Education Fund. The veterans really enjoyed watching the students take part in creating the garden and they love being able to go out and visit the garden, look at the beautiful flowers, and watch the pollinators.

All of this wouldn’t have been possible without the iEvolve training I received through BGSU, Cari Ritzenthauer who is a college professor and entomologist that has worked with my students, and the Ohio Environmental Education Fund.

My ultimate goal is to instill passion in my students for pollinators and understanding the vital role they play in the abundance of our food supply.

How do Rain Gardens work?

Through our Lake Erie Coastal Clean Up project, we’ve designed and successfully planted a Rain Garden at Kiwanis Park in Sandusky, OH!

In response to this project, the 5th and 6th grade students have been researching how rain gardens work and provide some tips on how to create your own!

How does a rain garden work?

Rain gardens typically rely on plants and an engineered soil media to soak up stormwater. These plants take up nutrients and water that flow into the rain garden and they release water vapor back into the atmosphere through the process of transpiration. You may be wondering what a rain garden can grow. A rain garden grows native grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs. Generally the plants in a rain garden have very deep root systems.

How Does a Rain Garden Work/ How Does it Help

A rain garden works by reducing and collecting runoff. Rain gardens collect pollutants, which are things that pollute the atmosphere and water. It also is a place that pollinators Like bees and butterflies come. Rain gardens provide habitat and food to nearby animals.
Overall rain gardens help slow runoff, remove pollutants, and help the pollinators and animals.

Creating a Rain Garden/ How to Make It.

Create a rain garden by building a flat strip of land, berm, at a low spot of you yard. Then build a hollow tube,swales, to channel gutter water to your berm. Then the water is absorbed into the soil through the network of deep plant roots. Use a mix of plants native to your area and that can survive different water depths.

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Why should we clean up Lake Erie?

Those of us who live on the shores of Lake Erie know that it is not a clean ecosystem. The 5th and 6th grade students offer us some insights on why Lake Erie is “dirty” and why we should fix it.

Algal Blooms and how soil contributes to them

Helping Lake Erie

Why it is important to protect Lake Erie

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Soil Quality Brochures

The quality of our soil is vital for growing and sustaining all of the plants that surround us! The 5th and 6th grade students explore this idea through chemistry each year. To find out more about their research, check out the brochures they’ve made!

Soil Types

Soil

Save the soil

How Does Soil Help our world?

All About Soil

Soil information

The Facts about Soil

These brochures were shared with the public as the 2019 Earth Day Extravaganza at Osborn Park.

Fishing line is dangerous to animals!

Though our monofilament tube project is still getting up and running, the students of RCAAS are very passionate about the connection with our Lake Erie ecosystem. The 5th and 6th grade students have prepared some information about the dangers of leaving your broken fishing line in the water.

The Dangers of Fishing Lines and Why it is Important to Pick it up:

Fishing line, when it’s not disposed of properly, can cause a number of problems to the surrounding environment and wildlife. The most known impact is its effect on animals, birds, turtles, and fish. So when fishing line gets caught in your prop it can work its way into the prop shaft seal and let water into the lower unit oil.

Entanglement in or ingestion of fishing line sometimes with attached hooks, is a terrible, but yet all too common cause of injury or death for turtles, marine mammals, fish and birds. Anglers should always be aware of the dangers of monofilament.

Fishing lines can also be caught on branches and debris can harm animals and cause their legs, wings, and beaks to become entangled. Geese, ducks and gulls sustain crippling injuries after one or both of their legs become wrapped in fishing line. A hook that gets caught in a beak or mouth can make eating painful or impossible, resulting in death due to starvation.

It takes six hundred years to decompose a fishing line in a landfill. A broken fishing line can make it hard for the birds to forage for food or escape predators. When fishing line becomes tangled around a bird’s beak or bill, it can lead to starvation. Birds that ingest fishing line may eventually starve, too, because the plastic in their stomach restricts how much food they can digest.

Fishing lines are extremely hard to see when they are submerged in water, and fish, birds, and other marine life can easily become entangled, and they can cause starvation, amputation, and death. Monofilament lines present a risk to swimmers and scuba divers also.

Sites:

https://sierraclub.typepad.com/greenlife/2013/02/wildlife-friendly-trash- disposal-twine-and-fishing-line.htm

https://www.onthewingphotography.com › Home › Birds https://coastalanglermag.com › deadly-lines

Fishing Nets, worse than plastic straws

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Planting our Rain Garden at Kiwanis Park!

This particular garden faced a lot of setbacks, predominately because of our irregular rain patterns at the beginning of spring. This year was very wet and because of that, Lake Erie was overflowing and flooding the surrounding areas making it impossible for us to dig the hole we needed for the garden. Lucky for the area, we had a very dry July which made it possible for us to plant this garden in early August.

However, while prepping the area, 4th Grade teacher Karen Foss and Project Leader Cari Ritzenthaler ran into a rain storm. Fortunately, it allowed us to see how the water will be flowing into the garden and how good the soil is at retaining water!

Rain gardens are specialized gardens designed to clean the rain water run-off before the water flows into the groundwater or nearby lake, in our case. The Kiwanis baseball park was the perfect location because of its distance from the lake, but also because they had recently built a shelter that had gutters! The gutters allowed us to direct the rain water coming from the roof of the shelter into our garden, where the special plants and soil will filter the water before it runs into the lake. The filtration of rain water reduces the amount of pollutants and excess nutrients that can contaminate our lake.

We were luck enough to be able to partner with the City of Sandusky to help us dig the area out for our garden. We needed this step because we added our own soil from Barnes Nursery to ensure our plants would have the soil quality they needed, but also so it would be able to hold on to water better than the natural, compact clay soil that exists in the area. Next, we obtained our native plants from Shanz Native Plants, including Boneset, Fox and Frank’s Sedges, Wild Iris, Sweet Flag, and Joe Pye Weed. By choosing native plants, we are also ensuring that our garden can become habitat for our native animals.

Special thank you to all of the students, teachers, and parents who volunteered their time to help plant this garden! We hope you had as much fun as we did and can enjoy the garden and it’s positive environmental effects for years to come.

Planting the Pollinator Garden at OVH

During the RCAAS Dorn 2019 Summer Experience, titled Power of Pollinators, we started building our pollinator garden at the Ohio Veterans Home!

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The maintenance staff at OVH was kind enough to remove grass and add mulch to the area in preparation for our planting.

On a nice sunny day in June, we were finally ready to plant! The plants in this garden are native to Ohio, which is vital because will provide habitat and food to our native pollinators (see Earth Day Extravaganza! for student-made brochures about why native plants/pollinators are important and why pollinators are declining worldwide). We planted Black-eyed Susans, Purple and Green Cone Flowers, Rattlesnake Master, and much more!

The most difficult part of planting this garden was the dense clay soil, which was filled with large rocks. It was hard work for our students to pull these rocks out and resulted in braking many of the shovels. However, to make lemons out of lemonade, the students painted the rocks as decorations for the garden! They made quite a few flags, some animals, bees, flowers, and angels.

If you visit this garden today, you may notice a few holes where plants once were. Unfortunately, the very hot and very dry weather that followed our planting event has proved to be too tough on a few of the plants. We intend to fill in these holes in the fall. The garden itself will also fill out more and more with each passing year that the plants return.

Special thank you to Dr. Charu Chopra for your amazing help planting, watering, and maintaining this garden with us! Additional thank you for letting us post photos of your son, Ishan, to showcase how much fun the students had planting and watering the garden!