Welcome to our new Science project:
I had applied for some funding from the Royal Society for a big pond in the Forest School area.
When we took part in the Biodiversity project at the Langton Girls' school, the children thoroughly enjoyed the pond dipping experience. Our outdoor area could be enhanced by so many other animal and plant species. The funding has been granted and our research project can begin.
Our research question : “How does the presence of a pond on school grounds influence biodiversity and ecological awareness among primary school students?” will be answered throughout the coming year. Year 3 children filled in initial baseline knowledge questionnaires and a selection of the rest of the school will follow.
We had two very exciting visitors in school: Barbara, who is an anthropologist, lecturer and conservationist and she currently works on a projects to build ponds in Costa Rica to particularly save endangered frog species. We also had Harpreet who is a conservationist and very knowledgeable about snakes and newts. I believe the Year 3 children have been inspired to find out more about snakes already!
We then split up into small groups to collect our baseline data of what grows and lives in our outdoor pond area. Children wrote down all the different species of butterflies, invertebrates, flying insects, birds and plants that they could see, catch in a sweep net or hear. One of the groups learned about what amphibians are and which ones we might see moving into our pond area.
The next step will be to build the actual pond and hope that we have lots of wildlife move in.
Science Pond project
