Elizabeth
In our Literate About Biodiversity Project, each class is helping to answer the question “What is the biodiversity of the Waterville Plateau?”
Now we will show you how these ideas fit into each of our classroom investigations.

Kalah
Everybody in the school K-8 would use science to improve reading, writing and speaking. We would work together to write a field guide of common species, make a walking tour map of drought tolerant plantings, add pictures to the school mural, and plant a native plant garden.

Julia
The kindergarten is studying spiders.
They caught a lot of spiders, put them in jars and then they studied them. One was pregnant, they watched it have babies and then it died. A lot of other kids brought in spiders also. I brought in a black widow that I found in my garage. We have a whole bunch and they are very common around Waterville. As the kids learned facts about spiders on the internet and in books, the teacher recorded them on charts and pretty soon the kids could read the charts. They took data sheets, looked at their spiders and wrote the information down on the data sheets. They had a middle school mentor who helped them. People who study spiders are called Arachnologists.
Kalah
Everybody in the Waterville School is helping everybody else collect data. Whenever we find an insect,interesting rock,flower, spider, or other animal that a class is learning about, we bring it down to the class and fill out a data sheet for them.

Julia
The first graders are collecting specimens of butterflies and moths. They are learning that every butterfly is not a monarch. In Waterville we have lots of different butterflies. The first graders have found cocoons, caterpillars, and live butterflies to show all the parts of the life cycle. Right now they are each watching their own crysalis to see how it hatches.

Kalah
The 2nd graders really know their birds! First they studied owls. They read fiction and non-fiction books about owls and learned to identify the owls of the Waterville Plateau. One of the books was Owl Moon. Then they used field guides, puppets and real stuffed birds to learn about the other common birds. They chose three birds for the field guide-the flicker, the robin and the great horned owl . The kids are working in groups to write a field guide page for each bird. Some of the artistic kids like Kristina will be drawing sketches for the field guide. One interesting thing that happened was that all the kids thought we had lots of crows around Waterville, but they found out they were really ravens.