Aquaponic System Build with Oak Hill Montessori

At Spark-Y, we are working with our partners to collectively navigate distance-learning, and at the same time, we recognize the importance of hands-on learning activities that engage the hearts, hands, and minds of young people. With Oak Hill Montessori School returning to in-person learning, we were able to partner with them to give students hands-on experience learning about sustainability and power tools while creating their very own aquaponic system. After creating this system, they will now be able to take care of fish and grow plants right at the school! Of course, all Covid-19 precautions were put into place during this build in order to make this happen as safely as possible. The build was outside, masks were required, and students rotated to stations in small groups. 

Why do we love building aquaponic systems you may ask? Well, it's a great tool to teach concepts such as sustainability, biology, chemistry, math, and much more. Aquaponic systems facilitate a symbiotic relationship between fish and plants. Fish waste adds ammonia to the system. Bacteria then converts the ammonia into nitrites and then nitrates. Plants use nitrates to create proteins for growth, and in return the fish get clean water. It’s an incredible way to grow fresh produce all year long!

Now that we got the biology lesson out of the way, let’s talk about why hands-on learning is so important. First of all, it's fun and engaging. I don't know about you but when I was sitting for a school lecture I often found myself day-dreaming and not soaking in a lot of the information. It is so important to facilitate learning with several senses at once. Young people need room to tinker, make mistakes, and try again. Particularly in the era of Covid, it is important to keep students from getting screen fatigue by adding some hands-on learning opportunities into their curriculum.

Of course, the students at Oak Hill were excited to not only be away from their screens doing hands-on learning, but also to be outside and using tools. They rotated to three stations throughout the day for the build. One station measured dimensions of the wood planks for the tank, another cut the wood, and the last station assembled the aquaponic tank.

While assembling the system, one student, Saphira, said, “I’m excited to have fish we can take care of in our own garden. I am grateful for Spark-Y because we get to have hands-on experience during Covid instead of just studying. It makes school so much more fun.”

Throughout this process, the students had lots of energy because they were so excited about the project. While we love the enthusiasm, I also made the point that in construction projects like this one, efficiency is key. I told them, "if you're not paying attention, you're not being efficient and potentially creating an unsafe environment for your team." To my surprise the students really resonated with that, and one student even started calling out to other students, "that's not efficiency!" whenever other students were goofing around. As time went on more students were yelling, "efficiency!" when they completed a certain task. I really got a kick out of this because in my professional experience my bosses have always harped about efficiency. This is something that was encouraged but never taught in school. This is why hands-on learning is so important to me and many others. Without it we miss the nuances between practice and theory. The aquaponics build was truly a great way for students at Oak Hill to take a break from the screen and learn about aquaponics and sustainability.

Students at Oak Hill Montessori school now have their very own aquaponic system where they can grow produce right at the school. They can now work together to care for their system and continue hands-on learning during Covid and beyond!

Written by Ryland Sorensen - Spark-Y Sustainability Educator

Get On The Bus - A Week in the Life

We are in an unprecedented time with countless community spaces and resources shutting down or providing limited resources due to the novel coronavirus. Perhaps the most notable of the closings in March being schools. Students of all ages have been staying home and learning with limited resources for the past 5 months.

Spark-Y partnered with the African American Community Response Team (AARCT) to bring a six week summer learning program to the third to eighth grade students of Best Academy and Friendship Academy/Freedom School. The program is called Get on the Bus (GOTB). It was held at local parks and ran Monday to Thursday from around 9am to 4pm. Buses departed to pick up students at 8:30am with breakfast running from roughly 9am to 9:30am. The Get on the Bus program provided students breakfast, lunch, and a safe way to learn and play.

Our number one priority is the safety of students and staff. As such, students were screened for symptoms of COVID-19 every day before the program as the bus picked them up from home and as they arrived at the program location. Students were expected to keep their masks on both indoors and outdoors.

Students were split into three groups and rotated between three stations: recreation, online learning, and STEM. The curriculum for the outdoor STEM station was coordinated by Spark-Y staff and run by our GOTB interns. Much like our other programs, the curriculum for GOTB is hands-on and sustainability focused. Each week had a theme: renewable energy, water, plants and growing food outside, pollinators, pests, & urban naturalists, vermicomposting & waste, and the science of COVID-19.

During the “pollinators, pests, & urban naturalists” week, the Monday activity was building simplified models of flowers and pollinators using a cup and pipe cleaners. This activity demonstrated how animals help pollen move from plant to plant and which ones are the most effective at doing so.

Photo Credit: Sarah Anderson

On Tuesday, students learned about why animals visit and pollinate flowers along with which colors different pollinators are attracted to the most. For example, butterflies are the most attracted to blue or purple flowers and bats are attracted to large, cone shaped flowers. Students were assigned a pollinator and asked to look at data to guess which flower traits their pollinator likes the best. They were then asked to choose from a set of flower pictures and decide which flower their pollinator would like the best.

Photo Credit: Sophia Osterberg

Students got a little dirty looking for insects on Wednesday with our bug collection activity. After a brief discussion about the habitats of insects our groups went searching for insects with butterfly nets. Each student recorded their observations about the insect’s habitat, appearance, how many legs it had, and any other characteristics they noticed. While collecting insects, one student loved the activity and told us, “When I grow up, I’m definitely going to do this job. I want to do this job!”

Photo Credit: Sophia Osterberg

Our final activity for the week was building bee houses for mason bees. Although mason bees do not make honey, they are pollinators who make nests in natural holes and cracks. Bee houses for mason bees are versatile. The traditional classroom bee houses are usually made of wood and cut bamboo shoots. Since using power tools at the parks is difficult, the houses were adapted and created using plastic water bottles, rolled paper bags, and string. Students were creative and used paper, sticks, and leaves to decorate the houses and blend into the natural environment. One student in particular was thrilled, “I made the bees a living room so they can hang out in the house! And this big, huge room is where they are going to have dances and parties!”

Photo Credit: Sophia Osterberg

Written by Patrice Banks - Spark-Y Sustainability Educator

Learning Continues - At Home, Online, and At Your Neighborhood Drain

The following blog post was written by Cecelia Watkins, Spark-Y Curriculum Director, on our partner program with Crossroads Elementary.

On Sunday afternoon, March 15, my heart sank. I had just heard Governor Walz’s announcement that all Minnesota schools would be ordered to close in an effort to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, starting Wednesday. I also got word that Saint Paul Public Schools wouldn’t be opening on Monday or Tuesday either; after a week of no school due to a teacher’s strike, it would be total chaos to start school back up only to have it end two days later. We never even got to say goodbye to our students.

Just like that, all our carefully laid plans went up in smoke. How could we possibly do the annual 5th grade Aquaponics Unit at Crossroads Elementary now? After weeks of letting water flow through the students’ ten gallon tanks to establish nitrification, we had been just about ready to add bluegill and goldfish to the experimental ecosystems. Now all the fish had to be evacuated since we’d no longer have access to the school building. And what would happen to all the tiny kale and tomato plants the students had been tending for weeks, ones that they’d just transplanted?

It was easy to feel robbed in those early days of the pandemic. How unfair that these 5th graders wouldn’t get to experience the springtime fish fry when we harvest the school’s tilapia for fish tacos! Crossroads students look forward to this Aquaponics unit for YEARS--when the current 5th graders were 3rd graders they were asking me when they’d get to run their own 10 gallon tanks. Now we just don’t know how we can offer them that quintessential Spark-Y experience. I have no doubt students across the country and around the world have felt the pain of being denied experiences they’d worked towards for years, from proms to graduations.

After the first few days, the sense of injustice shifted to a daunting question: How do we facilitate empowering hands-on education when schools are closed and no one’s supposed to go within 6 feet of anyone else? How can we still be of service to our community and Spark-Y youth?

Ah, the miracles of technology! Most people will tell you, I’m generally somewhat of a Luddite: opposed to excessive use of technology. I’m always asking, “Could we do this activity outside?” and “How can we get away from screens to teach this?” Well, in times like these, I’m sold: screens and a variety of technologies have been incredibly helpful in adapting to the new world of distance learning. As the past two weeks have unfolded, I’ve been impressed by how quickly my Spark-Y co-workers have demonstrated excellence in adaptation: we’ve done hours long collaborative planning sessions with our co-teachers over Zoom, fleshed out entire Google Classrooms and FlipGrids, and edited together footage using WeVideo. As we prepared for schools to resume --distance learning style-- we continuously asked ourselves: how can we go beyond kids interacting with a screen? Sure, the chromebooks and iPads that schools have sent home with students will be a fantastic way for us to connect, but when it comes down to it, we’re still Spark-Y: all about hands-on experiences. 

The trouble is, we know there’s a huge range in what supplies and supports our students have access to in their homes. Even if we make awesome student-facing activity instructions that don’t require any caregiver guidance, how do we ensure young scholars have what they need to do our hands-on projects? How do we not further widen the achievement gap during a time when that seems all but inevitable? 

We’ve come up with two solutions. One is to create what we’re calling “drop-site kits.” The idea is to package up all the supplies students would need to do a set of activities at home, and then drop the kits off at schools or community centers for student pick up. One kit could have everything students needed for a week of exploring the science behind germination, complete with seeds, test tubes, rock wool and labels. Another kit might be all about circuitry, with LED lights, breadboards and batteries included. Once the Shelter in Place order is lifted, we’re excited to explore how we can prepare drop-site kits for our school partners in a way that’s safe (I’m imagining lots of hand sanitizer) while still getting our youth the supplies they need. 

Luckily, the second solution to the issue of equitable supply access we can get started on right now: developing activities that highlight what almost all of us do have access to. We’ve been writing up activities where students will be working with water, dirt, trees, leaves fallen on the ground and even what’s in the recycling bin. Did you know you could Adopt A Drain in your neighborhood or test the permeability of your sidewalk? We’re excited to send students activity instructions to invent their own water filters using entirely recycled materials, and to go on Minnesota spring Scavenger Hunts for native plants. Some days I think more could be learned just by sitting on a back porch and listening for an hour than in any YouTube video I could send my students.   

Regardless, I will still be sending videos to my Crossroads students. They will include me conducting science experiments with the 10 gallon aquaponics set up that now lives in my basement, full of the students’ plants. They will be dorky, very homemade videos. I could easily link to pre-existing YouTube videos with snazzy effects, made by a whole professional crew, but I’m hoping they’ll appreciate a familiar face.

Of course, it’s not easy. It’s downright painful that so many critical events have been cancelled and critical places closed off to us. But it’s more important than ever to remind ourselves of everything that’s not cancelled: connection to each other. Fresh air. Springtime.