The idea was to send the students out with cameras to photograph then research all the living things we found in our ecoregion. There is no better way to discover the diversity of life within your own backyard then hands on exploration. I started by producing a skeletal structure for the website then created templates for the categories we were interested in, insects, birds, mammals, plants, and other (those rare oddities within our moist-mixed grassland region that do not fit either category). My large collection of plant, insect, and animal books were used to identify and provide information on the different species we encountered.

Being that this was the first time I ever attempted such a project, and had never heard of anyone else ever taking such an initiative, I was unsure how much the students would take away from the exercise. It was only after the class was complete and I ran into a couple students from the comprehensive did I realize the extent of my success. The one girl was complaining to me about her friend, they were out at the city dumping grounds and all her friend would talk about were facts she learned about the California Gull during the course of her research.

Click here to visit the Sci9 website

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