New Video: Gardens & Citizen Science Project in Woodland Elementary Schools

The Center for Community and Citizen Science is happy to share this new video, produced by our partner Yolo County Office of Education, describing our collective work on citizen science in school gardens. The video introduces our ongoing Gardens & Citizen Science Project, and profiles the work teachers are doing to implement citizen science school gardens, in Woodland, California! Check out the video here.

The Gardens & Citizen Science Project with Yolo COE, Yolo Farm to Fork, and the UC Davis Student Farm to engage students in citizen science projects linked to grade-level NGSS and ELA standards. 

The partners have worked with classroom teachers, school garden coordinators and after school staff at elementary schools in Woodland Joint USD . 

Our professional learning workshops and follow-up coaching have provided participants with practice in making field observations on school sites, conducting science investigations, generating questions about natural phenomena, collecting and analyzing data, communicating learning, and helping students discover and engage their natural curiosity by becoming community scientists. 

This project has been focused on both classroom and after-school settings, grades K-6. The teacher leaders have also developed a fourth-grade unit that integrates a citizen science project on the school campus with a specific unit in the district-adopted ELA curriculum. 

This was presented to all fourth-grade teachers at a district collaboration day, and the partners are working on developing similar units linked to the ELA curriculum for other grade levels. 

We are also excited to be extending this work through the federally-funded CitSci on the Farm project, getting underway this year. Read more about that effort here.