Prep

      When I'd first heard of BioSITE, I was kind of interested,  mainly because I didn't know what BioSITE was about. I needed something to do for my ecology service learning project and was out of ideas, so I decided to do this as my project.  Although I still had no idea of what to expect - especially of the fourth graders. Luckily, now I know (mainly) what to expect from little kids (and thank goodness for that, I mean, it's over).  But in all seriousness, I had fun, and actually learned some stuff that I didn't know before, and re-learned things I already knew before in a better way than previously taught to me in my adolescent years.

      The prep for this project took place over 5 weeks, where everyone got a refresher/ crash course on all of the topics we would discuss during the actual teaching part of BioSITE.  We searched through compost from the very garden we would teach in, and then figured out how long it takes for stuff to decompose.  We learned of the anatomy of a chicken.  We were able to dissect a seed and see the differences between those wet and dry.  The list goes on. After we learned all of this, we had to divide into teams and come up with the way we were going to teach the fourth graders, which, for my team (Destiny, Madison, and I) took about a week.  Our plan was to kick off the lesson with a name game to get everyone affiliated with each other, where we each said our name, favorite food, and what we knew about compost.  Then, we would talk a little bit about what you can and can't compost and would have them look at the compost for a few minutes.  After about 10 minutes, we would play the trash timeline.  This plan was followed pretty well and the fourth graders seemed to enjoy it.  I learned a lot during BioSITE, but the biggest thing I learned was that kids can be loud and rambunctious and not even care, but if you give them a shovel and tell them to find bugs inside of dirt (or whatever it is that you're doing) they will gladly follow you and listen.  I also learned that it's important to teach people about these things because no one knows everything about the environment and how to save it.