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April 26, 2004
ADP Table at CSC's Sci-Tech Festival a Big Success
The Allegheny Defense Project's table at the Carnegie Science Center's "Sci-Tech Festival" in Pittsburgh on Saturday, April 24th was a successful outreach to the community, and was an effective educational tool for the festival's target audience. Children from the pre-school through the early teen age groups enjoyed the "Succession of Vegetative Communities" activity board.
Karen Wood-Campbell helps a young festival participant with the ADP activity board.
Festival organizers were pleased with ADP's participation and were happy to see how well children of all ages interacted with the display and how many families gathered aruond ADP's table.
The display, titled "Succession of Vegetative Communities," shows a forest growing through time, passing through the following phases:
- Field/meadow
- Shrub/brush
- Young starter trees (pioneers)
- Young forest (established)
- Old-growth (climax) forest
Various bird and plant figures were provided as board pieces for participants. When kids approached, they were invited to place the birds and plants in their natural habitats on the board. The pieces attached to various locations on the board with velcro, and a chart was provided to help them. While the children participated, the tablers (and sometime's the kids' parents!) helped to explain how only certain plants and birds occur in specific phases of forest succession, and how rare a real old-growth forest actually is.
Close up of the "Succession of Vegetative Communities" Display Board.
Personally, it was gratifying to see the pleasure these kids showed on their faces while learning about habitats and animals. But more importantly, for some kids, the realization really clicked that there isn't that much old growth around any more, and some even made the connection themselves between that fact and the reasons (at least partial) for why the Indiana Bat is endangered and the Cerulean Warbler is on several watch lists.
The board was created by Karen Wood-Campbell, Ryan Little and Mary Kate Kelley.
Tablers were Karen Wood-Campbell and Ryan Little.
Posted by Ry Little at April 26, 2004 10:44 PM
Comments
Sounds like this was a hit...I really like the photo of forest successional stages. Good contrast to AHUG's chopping "interfering" trees away from "important" trees that they feed to children in our schools.
Ryan
Posted by: Ryan at April 27, 2004 02:14 PM
Good going! I agree, it would be great to take something like this into the schools, if we could only talk Nat. Audubon or one of the other biggies into it. From what I've heard, "Project Learning Tree" has had some pretty insidious effects.
Posted by: Dave at April 29, 2004 07:55 PM
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