Education

NEW! 8th grade service learning project culminates. Read more about it at Bugs and Butterflies.

The Preserve offers numerous opportunities to enhance student learning in a wide range of subjects.

• In the spring, elementary students travel the field in 'wagon trains' reenacting Pioneer life as their unit on American history culminates.
• Keep an eye on the field and you are certain to see the middle school track team traversing the field on cross-country runs.
• In 2002, sixth grade students put their study of Biomes to a real world test, as docents from the Back Country Land Trust implemented a weeklong curriculum specifically designed for the field, based on the state standards for Science. Featuring hands-on strategies students identified biotic and abiotic factors, read topography maps, explored the field's biology and performed dissections on coyote scat and owl pellets.
• Trash cleanup and the benefits of recycling on campus became a focus for an ambitious group of students at Joan MacQueen Middle School in Alpine in 2003. "Do Your Part for the Planet Day", provided students a unique opportunity to provide service to the school community, while utilizing their creative talents to raise student awareness in regard to both the amount of trash generated on campus and the need to: Reduce, Reuse & Recycle.
• BCLT believes in connecting kids with healthy choices. Students at the district’s alternative site engaged in a project focused on creative expression as they painted a large (9' x 21') Rainforest mural. In addition to connecting them with their own creativity and producing a billboard size piece which supports the environment, students utilized Wright's Field for biology and history lessons, as well as a place for quiet reflection.
• In spring 2004, Back Country Land Trust Board Member Michael Wangler led middle school students through a Geology lesson on the Preserve. In addition to studying the metamorphic rocks that proliferate the area, Mr. Wangler lectured on the interaction between geology, soil, native plant life, and the Kumeyaay relationship to this environment.
• Trails Day, a national event in early June each year, finds students from our neighboring high schools, collaborating with land trust and community members to fulfill their community service requirement for graduation.
• In Spring 2007, Brendan Casey, science teacher from Joan McQueen Middle School, enlisted his eighth grade science students to help Michael Klein, of Klein-Edwards Professional Services, conduct research on the rare hermes copper butterfly. The JMMS students, along with students from FISH camp in Alpine, helped Klein capture and mark adult hermes in several identified colonies in the field. Klein estimates the hermes does not travel far, perhaps several hundred yards, but documentation is needed to find out. A limited dispersal pattern means the hermes has a difficult time expanding from territories.
• In the pipeline are programs partnering teens-at-risk with service learning opportunities. Teens-at-risk benefit from innovative community intervention programs that allow them the opportunity to 'give back', becoming part of the solution, rather than holding onto the ‘problem’ label.