Environmental Education Field trip

Partnering with UK Extension office’s Kenton and Campbell County and Kenton County Schools

DJ Scully
Campbell County Extension Agent for Natural Resources and Environmental Management
djscully@uky.edu Phone: (859) 572-2600 Fax: (859) 572-2619

Program overview
This program will allow youth to learn important facts about our environment. This program will be offered as a field trip to Kenton County 5th grade class rooms. The class will visit the Environmental Education Center to encounter several hands on experiences about our environment. Each group will be put into 5 groups and rotate to five different activities, which will include: Soil Studies, Water Cycle, Animal Adaptations, water Quality and forestry.

How this program will be offered.

This program will be offered in the fall and spring to any 5th grade class in Kenton County. It will be posted on the Kenton County 4-H web page and a flyer will be sent to each school.
5th grade Science

Kentucky Learning Goals
2.1 Students understand scientific ways of thinking and working and use those methods to solve real-life problems.
2.3 Students identify and analyze systems and the ways their components work together or affect each other
2.4 Students use the concept of scale and scientific models to explain the organization and functioning of living and nonliving things and predict other characteristics that might be observed.

2.5 Students understand that under certain conditions nature tends to remain the same or move toward a balance.
2.6 Students understand how living and nonliving things change over time and the factors that influence the changes.


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Students will describe cause and effect relationships between enhanced survival/reproductive success and particular biological adaptations (e.g., changes in structures, behaviors, and/or physiology) to generalize about the diversity of populations of organisms.
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Students will understand that all organisms must be able to obtain and use resources, grow, reproduce, and maintain stable internal conditions while living in a constantly changing external environment.
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Students will understand that the Sun is a major source of energy for changes on Earth’s surface. The Sun loses energy by emitting light. A tiny fraction of that light reaches Earth, transferring energy from the Sun to Earth.
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Students will:
Describe and categorize populations of organisms according to the function they serve in an ecosystem (e.g., producers, consumers, decomposers);
Draw conclusions about the effects of changes to populations in an ecosystem.
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Students will understand that a population consists of all individuals of a species that occur together at a given place and time. All populations living together and the physical factors with which they interact compose an ecosystem.

Assessment

The students will be assessed by taking a pretest and a posttest over content covered in the program.