Alpha

One of our Class Helper’s jobs… giving our worm farm a good moisture-producing rain-spray! This week in Our Big Backyard… We talked about the rich, diverse community of Ponds. What is the water’s edge? How is it different from the muddy bottom, the surface film or the open water? What creatures thrive in Ponds? We looked at how energy is transferred in food chains through primary producers to primary consumers and on to secondary, tertiary and apex consumers. We realized humans like hawks, bears, and coyotes are also apex predators! We also looked at the series of stages a frog […]

This week in Our Big Backyard… We started this week off making models of a hilly watershed – similar to our Edwards Plateau! We learned that the creeks running through Austin carry rainwater to the Colorado river along with any other chemicals or trash that the rain washes into the creek. The water carves a creek-bed and alongside that is the bank. The area of land running next to a creek or river is called a “riparian zone.” A riparian zone is very important to the health of our water because without grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees, our rivers and

Indoor recess shenanigans This Week in Our Big Backyard… We discovered how trees are farms & communities. Trees build relationships with a variety of plants and animals. We learned that trees host other plants such as lichen and mosses. And that a whole host of creatures create and depend on the complex and diverse ecosystems in and around trees. Here in central Texas, mammals such as squirrels, opossums, foxes, deer, need the food and shelter trees provide. Tree frogs can live their entire lives in a tree using water that is caught in the cradle of branches. Reptiles such as

Abundance: when you have so many things to share… This week in Our Big Backyard… TREES! TREES! TREES! We were all about the trees this week! Our Big Backyard at school has some great pecan trees planted in the early 1900s and across the street, we have examples of a native tree called a live oak. These are very different trees, but they still have the same parts. We went outside and sketched side-by-side portraits of each. We noticed these trees were shaped differently, in sizes, and colors. Everything in nature has a purpose – so we pondered, and inferred

“This leaf looks like a beetle’s wing-shields!” This week in Our Big Backyard… Alphas learned that Austin is in a very special place in Texas. We knew that Hyde Park was built on Blackland Prairie, but we learned that when we go west of here, once we get to Shoal Creek, we hit rocky hills that are the edge of the Edwards Plateau. This is an important land feature that helps explain how we have so much water here—water drains downhill, and we live downhill! Water attracts all kinds of living things and Austin used to have all kinds of