For elementary students in the Syracuse City School District, science education can be as hands-on as playing in the snow.

Syracuse city students in kindergarten through sixth grade are applying their classroom knowledge to the outdoors, thanks to the district’s partnership with Baltimore Woods Nature Center. Brittany Emig, an intern for Baltimore Woods’ environmental education program, described one activity the kids do: making snowflake catchers and examining the individual shapes of each snowflake.

In January 2018 the program, called Nature in the City, received its first multi-year grant from KeyBank, a long-supporting corporate partner. According to a Baltimore Woods press release, the $25,000 donation will be used to continue enriching city classrooms through hands-on science learning and nature field trips. The program hopes to continue building upon the success it established five years ago.

Located on Bishop Hill Road in Marcellus, Baltimore Woods is an educational nonprofit organization that works on connecting people to nature, per the release. Established first as “Onondaga Nature Centers” in 1966, then called “Centers for Nature Education,” its land is the first of more than 37 natural areas acquired by the Central New York Land Trust since 1972 to preserve natural landforms. The current name was adopted in 2008 to distinguish the center’s identity.

Whitney Lash-Marshall, executive director of Baltimore Woods, said she believes in the power of place-based education.

“That can mean people coming out to Marcellus and connecting to the 182-acre preserve here on one of our trails or at one of our education programs,” she said, “or it can mean us going to Syracuse and connecting these students in the district to the neighborhood and the environment that surrounds them, where they go to school.”

Whitney Lash-Marshall is the executive director of Baltimore Woods, which hosts the Nature in the City education program.
Paul Schlesinger | Staff Photographer

What started as a pilot project with one school in 2002 has grown into a transformative partnership that benefits every single kindergarten through sixth grade classroom in the Syracuse City School District, per the release. Nature in the City has brought indoor and outdoor hands-on science learning to all 19 SCSD elementary schools and connected in-class knowledge to the neighborhood environment.

Nature in the City conducts three one-hour interactive classes to more than 10,800 school students each year, with just five current educators cycling through more than 400 classrooms, Lash-Marshall said. Funded half by Syracuse City School District and half by community partners and donors, the program is always updated to follow the New York State Science Standards as well as to supplement topics already taught in school, she said.

Emig, a program intern, said the topics covered by the program vary depending on the curriculum and education standards for each year. Each grade follows the Elementary Science Core Curriculum and receives different learning objectives and themes in terms of the natural science topics students explore, according to the program’s website.

“We base all of our programs off that and try to relate it to what they are already learning in the classroom,” she said.

Emig is a senior studying environmental education and interpretation at SUNY-ESF. She assists the educators in the classroom and will teach a “Maple Magic” class in the spring, where she’ll make maple syrup from tree sap. Emig said she wants to work as a forestry preschool teacher with an outside classroom.

The fourth and fifth grade classes Emig assists right now are learning about different forms of energy. She said students are using a hand crane to light up a light bulb or bouncing sugar crystals on a toy drum to see how energies transform in real life.

“My favorite part of the internship is that I get to see these handful of educators teach in very different ways,” Emig said.

Students also learn about the water cycle and visit local streams and lakes to study invertebrates and underwater ecosystems and bring back pond samples to test water quality, per the website.

“They work to create environmentally-literate stewards. They want the kids to be literate around environmental topics,” said Dana Corcoran, supervisor of science and technology at the Syracuse City School District. Her office acts as a middleman in coordinating the scheduling between Baltimore Woods Nature Center and the schools and teachers in the district.

She said so far, these efforts have proven successful.

“We have seen an increase in our students’ understanding of scientific concepts as they progress through the years,” Corcoran said, referencing results from annual New York State test scores as well as assessments conducted by Baltimore Woods Nature Center.

According to statistics provided by Lash-Marshall, 95 percent of teachers responded in a recent survey that “their students showed an increased interest in the natural world as a result of the program,” and 99 percent of teachers recognized that Nature in the City “enhanced and enriched their classroom instruction of science curriculum.”

Students in second, third and fifth grades are given an assessment with the same questions before and after partaking in Nature in the City, to test what they learned through the program. Baltimore Woods also conducts a survey and gathers focus groups of teachers in the spring every year to gain feedbacks on the program.

“The impact, I think, is huge because what Baltimore Woods provides for our students are opportunities, experiences and knowledge that they might not receive living in their community,” Corcoran said.

Published on February 12, 2018 at 9:48 pm

Contact Jiaman: jpeng04@syr.edu