Norristown Area School District has a longstanding partnership with Riverbend Environmental Education Center to support our third and fourth grade scholars learning about environmental science. Third grade takes a field trip every spring to the Norristown Farm Park and fourth grade takes a field trip every fall to Riverbend, located in Gladwyne. These are some highlights from the fourth grade field trips this year.
Before the field trip, Riverbend facilitated a lesson in each fourth grade classroom about ecosystems. Students completed an activity where they created food chains with images and arrows, and they learned about how energy moves through a food chain.
Each school had its own day for fourth graders to travel to Riverbend and spend the day in nature learning even more about ecosystems and environmental science. Students rotated through four different stations with their class. Riverbend’s program description for the Ecosystem Interactions Field Trip says, “An ecosystem is a community of living (biotic) things interacting with the nonliving (abiotic) things in their environment. Bring this lesson to life by exploring the interrelationship of living and nonliving things at Riverbend’s forest, stream, and pond! Students will also focus on science observation skills in one station focused on nature journaling.”
These are the four stations the students rotated through:
Visual Observation: Students used words, images, and numbers to fill out their nature journals about a small stick they found. Then, students used their visual observation skills to match the sticks to their drawings.
Stream: Students explored one of Riverbend’s streams to see the habitat and to find evidence of erosion.
Pond: Students looked for the different life cycle stages of a frog in one of Riverbend’s ponds.
Forest: Students learned about three forms of decomposers. They discussed bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates.
After the field trip, Riverbend conducted a follow-up visit to each fourth grade classroom. Students went outside of their school building where they discovered and examined different types of living things. They found insects, plants, nuts, flowers, and more. This was to show the students that they can find living organisms wherever they are, even right in their own backyard.
Thank you Riverbend for hosting our scholars and creating such a great learning environment for them.