My Experience With Environmental Education.

                After learning what a place-based or environmental based education was I discovered that I had experienced examples of this throughout my time as a student. I decided to write about this in a blog post because I figured some of the ideas my past teachers had about implementing this idea of place based education into a regular public school classroom could give ideas to other teachers looking to do the same. 
                Place based education is a type of education that "immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences, using these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum.(http://www.promiseofplace.org/what_is_pbe)" Though this idea is not common in public education there are ways to incorporate the ideas of this into a classroom. 
           I'll start with the first example in my experience. There are these things called "butterfly kits" that you can order off the internet. `Basically they send you a couple of caterpillars and a place to put the butterfly's ( a netted container ). You get to observe these butterflies through each step of the process of metamorphosis. Once they become butterflies you release them outdoors. We planted flowers in a small garden outside of our school and released the butterflies there when I did this in the third grade. I remember every time I saw a monarch butterfly I wondered if it was one of the ones i'd watched transform from caterpillar to butterfly. It really fostered an interest in learning about nature and butterflies and how they went from caterpillar to butterfly because I got to experience it first hand. 
         Another example of place based education programs that I participated in Nature's classroom a program that takes kids from city schools on a week long trip into the depth of the forest to experience nature and the earth. I attended Nature's classroom in the fifth grade, we packed up our things and headed off into Maine. The whole week was spent living and experiencing and learning about nature and our environment. I remember we did all sorts of activities such as taking water samples from a marsh and finding insects in the woods on long hikes. My group leader was a bird watcher and pointed out all sorts of birds that we saw. This program was a great program to get us students excited about nature and science. It was awesome.
         When I was in ninth grade I took a biology class at my high school. I remember we did an activity that I thought was really cool. There is a pond across the street from the school and one day my teacher told us to get our stuff because we were going outside to learn. I remember thinking "we're going outside for class, in highschool?" I was so confused. I was used to studying things under a microscope in that class but it was always stuff provided on slides for us, we never really had much background on where it came from. My teacher had us go to the pond and take samples of the water so we could look for forms of life that were found in the pond. We took the samples back to the classroom and observed them under a microscope and then used a book to identify what we were seeing. It was so cool to have the topic relevant to our school and our environment it created a really memorable experience.
           Overall you don't need to have a full place based education school to be able to let your students experience nature. There are ways to incorporate lessons into regular public school classrooms. This type of learning is extremely beneficial to students and will foster a love of learning and of nature in the student.