Welcome to The Inoculation Project! This week, we're helping a Michigan elementary school improve their efforts to preserve native butterflies. As always, our conduit is DonorsChoose.org, an organization founded in 2000 and highly rated by both Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau. If you’re short on cash, don’t worry — we’re glad to see you anyway! And your tips, recs, shares, and so on are a good free way to help, by helping us get on the rec list and catch more eyes. Join us below for all the fun!
So that we can help both small and large projects, we usually present a relatively modest project each week, then feature a more ambitious project with a long-term deadline. As we chip away at the long-term project, our activity can also help push that project up DonorsChoose’s equivalent of our “rec list”, so it is shown to more donors outside Daily Kos. In that way, we can help finish projects that may be beyond our means when only our own dollars are considered.
Since our long-term project from last week was completed, we’re starting a new one as our featured project this week.
NEW LONG-TERM PROJECT
Resources: Perennial native plants for our butterfly garden.
School Poverty Level: Highest
Location: Jefferson International Academy, Waterford, Michigan
Total: $271.81
Still Needed: $271.81 $70.81
Expires: April 29, 2017
Teacher’s Comments from Mrs. Opolsky:
My Students: I have awesome students! I teach Kindergarten through 8th grade. Every year the students raise monarch caterpillars. We then tag them to help the University of Kansas monitor their migration. My students come from all different backgrounds and skills, but they all enjoy the fall butterfly unit. Many have been concerned that the population of monarch butterflies are declining. My fifth grade wanted to plant milkweed that the caterpillars need.
These enthusiastic students thought that if they planted milkweed to attract the monarchs, they might as well create a butterfly garden. They have been researching host and nectar plants for Michigan butterflies. They are eagerly awaiting spring so that they can plant!
The students learned about the butterfly life cycle by raising monarch caterpillars. When they had adult butterflies, they tagged the butterfly and collected data on it. They were so excited when the University of Kansas sent an email saying that one of the butterflies was recovered!
The students wanted to create more habitat for monarchs and other butterflies as well. They learned to use a field guide and used other resources to find the butterflies' host and nectar plants. They were learning to work in small teams.
They learned that some seeds and bulbs need to be cold before they sprout. They want to share their new knowledge with the rest of the school by creating signs that identify the plants, so they will learn some art skills. I see that they are understanding ecology concepts and have developed a hunger to conserve or create habitat for pollinators.
In Their Own Words: We will be making a garden that the whole school will enjoy! We will help our teacher feed the monarch caterpillars she buys in the fall. They only eat one kind of plant, so we will grow its milkweed. We want other butterflies to come to our garden, too. We will help other people understand that butterflies need certain plants for their caterpillars and for nectar. We will make signs so people know the names of the plants and what butterflies can come to them.
We are being leaders by helping the kindergartners plant seeds with us. We are being leaders by making signs to teach people about the plants and butterflies. We are being leaders in our community because we are creating more habitat for monarchs and other butterflies to live. We will do this with native plants that won't need a lot of water and will come up every year, so we are saving money and protecting the environment!
We know that the monarch butterfly population is getting smaller every year. If we can plant milkweed, we will be giving them the food we need. That is the only food they eat when they are caterpillars. When they are adults, they need to drink nectar. So do other butterflies, so we want to put in plants to see if we can get different butterflies. We can also help teach about other butterflies by putting up signs in the garden we plant.
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
Both projects from last week were completed (for a series total of 543!)
In our main project, Help Us STEAM Up Our Library, we helped school librarian Mrs. Lunsford buy materials for her North Carolina elementary school media center that children can use to build projects such as marble mazes of their own design.
Our long-term project, I Know What You Did !!, will buy several forensics-related kits for Ms. Davis’s Mississippi high school students (many of whom are first-generation high school students!), so that they can pull together their biology, chemistry, and physics studies to solve “crime” scenarios.
Our Dollars at Work
In October, we helped Mrs. Watts to build a Maker Space in her high-poverty urban Texas school, so 3rd-5th grade students could have a chance to use materials like Legos, K’Nex, and Snap Circuits to build whatever they liked, an opportunity most don’t get outside of school. The project was Maker Space Friday. (More photos at the link.)
… I can hardly begin to tell you how excited my students were when these items came in! The first Friday they came to see me, I had to pull them out of the door when it was time to leave for the weekend! ...
I had one student who was not too excited about coming to Makerspaces. Because he came in a bad mood the first week after my items arrived, he sat by himself with the Connex circuit box that has the bell connected to it. No one wanted to work with him and that was fine with him! After a bit of encouragement, he opened the box and began to follow the directions to build the circuit to make the bell ring. When the bell went off, you would have thought he won a prize! Since then, he's ALWAYS asking about coming and working with all of the kits I have!
Thank you so much making my maker space dream come true and for helping me expand the minds and horizons of students who may not otherwise have had this opportunity.
Founded in 2009, The Inoculation Project is an effort to combat the anti-science push in conservative America by providing direct funding to science and math projects in traditionally red-state classrooms and libraries. Our conduit is DonorsChoose.org, an organization founded in 2000 and highly rated by both Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau. DonorsChoose allows you to contribute to specific, vetted projects in public schools, resulting in tremendous and immediate impacts from small-dollar donations. Here’s an introductory video about DonorsChoose featuring Michelle Obama and Stephen Colbert.
Each Sunday morning, we focus on helping to fund one or two science and math projects in traditionally red-state schools, preferably in highest-poverty districts. We welcome everyone who shares our interest — no money is required! Your tip, rec, republish, comment, or share helps bring us more eyes, and besides, we like the company of others who love kids and education. Feel free to post a link or video, or just tell us how your weather is!
Finally, here’s our list of successfully funded projects. The success-list diary now also contains links and additional information about DonorsChoose, formerly found in this space.