Greenhouse Offers Hands-on Learning
By Emily Berg, Staff Writer
Scott Smeltzer/Staff Photographer Academy for Academic Excellence seventh-graders Eric Leatham, left, Kyle Rich, center, and Oscar Perez look over snapdragons Thursday. |
The plants had sucked in too much heat in their new home, a greenhouse.
Perez is one of Bill Deppe's students who is working in the new greenhouse. The seventh-grader attends the Academy for Academic Excellence, the charter school at the Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley.
"I think (plants) are nice and I think they're pretty," Perez said. "I just love plants."
The greenhouse is a key element to a new hands-on learning experience for the students. The greenhouse is funded by a $45,000 grant over three years from Mitsubishi Cement, said Deppe, the seventh-grade's life science teacher at the school.
The students will learn to make seeds and cuttings grow and multiply in the greenhouse of native and drought-resistant plants.
Later, the students' work could help rehabilitate the lost plant life on the Mitsubishi mining site.
The school received the greenhouse in November, and adults as well as students have helped construct it.
"It's like a giant erector set," Deppe said.
The 600-square-foot greenhouse still awaits a work station and cooling and heating systems, but students are already using it to learn the scientific method in a new experiment.
Students are determining the best fertilizer by watering and measuring three groups of snapdragons for the next month. They just started the project and the results are inconclusive, so far, Deppe said.
Many of the middle-school students who helped construct the greenhouse didn't know how to use a shovel, so it's not likely they've had much plant or gardening experience at home, Deppe said.
"This offers a variety of opportunity and new worlds," he said.
Students said they're excited to experiment with the greenhouse and see what happens to plants when they're too hot or cold. So far, they're interested in measuring the snapdragons' growth.
"We're going to see what really works," seventh-grader Kyle Letham said.
In the area around the greenhouse, the school plans to add a sheltered area to acclimate young plants to the weather, a garden and show beds to demonstrate the native plants that students grow, Deppe said.
Emily Berg can be reached at emily_berg@link.freedom.com or 955-5358
Used with permission by Daily Press, Freedom Communication, 2004