Seraphine Owens holds her tree core sample, one of the longest collected by the third through sixth grade class.
Ms. Jamie Matthew's third through sixth graders watch as Sara Lamar from Swan Valley Connections plots tree data on a graph.
Standing in a circle under an afternoon autumn blue sky, big fluffy clouds blocking the view here and there, the students of Swan Valley Elementary School were told to be a tree.
More specifically, a model of a tree.
Taylor Tewksbury, education program coordinator with Swan Valley Connections, explained that models are examples and scientists use them to understand something without, in a tree's case, needing to chop it down. Students made concentric circles of their classmates and were assigned different layers of a tree - the xylem, cambium, phloem and bark. Each layer had a catch phrase. For example, once assigned the bark layer, Swan Valley Elementary Schooler Dagny Williams was meant to chant, "we protect!" noting the role bark plays for a tree.
Swan Valley Connections started working with the grade school this year, offering special classes in topics like forestry, fire ecology and wildlife ecology. Last Wednesday's lesson focused on fire ecology, with a curriculum provided by the University of Montana fire science laboratory for which Tewksbury underwent training. Sara Lamar, education and connections managing director with Swan Valley Connections, said the goal with the series is to work with the school and provide more consistent and immersive education that's relevant to the part of the state the Condonites inhabit.
"We are learning about fire today because it's part of our life in Condon," Lamar said to students during a small group activity.
She asked the third through sixth grade class about what starts fires and why they're more dangerous in the summers. Students had ready answers (cigarettes, lightning and people as starters and the fact that it's so dry in the summer as a danger). Lamar continued to explain that lightning fires have been happening for a long time in the Swan Valley and many of the trees in the area are accustomed to it, and in some cases, need it. The larches the kids stood under developed thick bark to withstand fires and the lodgepole pines require heat to open their cones and spread seeds across a forest floor.
The students were given "recipe cards" for building a fire and set to work finding tree hair (lichen) and various sizes of branches. The challenge was to use only one match to start a fire, which was a little easier said than done.
Before the fire activity, students spent time gathering tree core samples. Students used special drills, which collected a sample as they plunged them further into a tree. They counted the lines they could see on the thin column of inner tree, just like one would do with a felled tree and the stump left behind. Some samples, that looked a bit like Pirouette cookies, indicated trees that were 60, 80 and 100 years old.
Lamar asked students to consider whether age and height were related when it came to trees. Plotting the data points - age discovered by the tree core samples and size by measuring the circumference of the trees with specific measuring tapes - it turned out the relation wasn't as straightforward as it was for people.
One student asked why it was important to know how old a tree is in the first place.
"We know that a good, healthy forest has a mix of ages," Lamar said. Just like a healthy community has a mix of ages, too, their teacher, Jamie Matthew, added.
Reader Comments(0)