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The School Forest Expedition
(This web page by: Elizabeth, Gina, Kristyn,
Po)
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INTRODUCTION
During
the Fall of 2003, our sixth grade classes went to the Cottage Grove School
Forest to decide whether it was healthy or not.
The first time we went to the forest, we observed the entire
forest.
Then our classes made posters of our observations.
All of the groups decided that we were going to do water tests on
the Cottage Grove School Forest Pond, so both classes went to The Aldo
Leopold Nature Center to learn and complete a few of the tests.
We learned how to do the other water tests at school.
All of us went back to the Forest and performed all of the tests
and collected the data.
We made posters based on our results, and presented them to the
class.
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GUIDING
QUESTION
Both
classes realized there was a problem with our guiding question.
Our original guiding question was, Is the Cottage Grove
School Forest healthy or unhealthy?
All of us found out that it was too broad to accomplish in our time
frame.
So
our classes narrowed our Guiding Question down to, Is the Cottage Grove
School Forest Pond healthy or unhealthy?
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FIELD WORK
We did
field work at two different places. One
place was The Aldo Leopold Nature Center. At Aldo Leopold both of our
classes learned how to do six water tests.
When we were there, everyone split up into groups of seven or
eight. The tests were pH, DO2, aquatic life, temperature, study
site profile, and turbidity. The
other place we did water testing was at the Cottage Grove School Forest
Pond. Everyone split up into seven groups of six or seven. Two of our
classmates and our teacher went into the pond with waders on.
They brought back probably two full buckets of water to test.
We did a wide variety of tests. They were all of the tests above,
including nitrates.
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