Eco-Literacy Blog

We met again in the beginning of June to learn from our guest speaker, Lea Elliott, about principles that we can learn from the garden. We played a diversity game, while learning about families of plants, and how diversity increases the garden's resilience. We also dug up soil from a few spots in the garden and counted the worms. Many students were thrilled to touch the worms and to understand how the amount of worms differs from area to area. Counting worms

On May 9, 2019, we met at the garden with Lori Weidenhammer to learn about pollinators and their role in our ecology. Lori talked about different types of bees, the reason most of them die after they sting, wasps, flies and butterflies. We set out to look for the pollinators and were even able to catch a few including a bumble bee queen! We also planted pollinator plant seeds in between the orchard trees nearby. When we picked at our veggie garden on our way back to school we saw that some of the veggies were growing very fast and the radishes were almost ready. The bumble bee queen

We met on November 23rd at the garden for a soil activity led by a fantastic group of UBC Environmental Sciences Undergraduate students. Their project was "Soil Education and Mapping: Place-Based Learning at Riley Park", a collaboration between Little Mountain Neighbourhood House (LMNH) and UBC. In the plan were a time machine role play, hand texturing activity, soil coring activity and colour identification task. We learned the about the types of soil and the different area in the garden where we could find them. We will meet the students again after winter break to reinforce learning and to expand on soil knowledge and practice soil mapping. Soil coring in the muddy lawn Watching the Time Machine play Hand texturing at the field house