Calendar Items:
UPCOMING EVENTS: Just because it’s nice to know, here is the next month or so I’ve got planned. (All plans are subject to change, of course.)
Feb 22nd – Mini-lessons by Liberty and Ivan, Sister Mock teaches Food Forests.
Feb 29th – Mini-Lessons by Isabelle and Simon, Brother Williams takes the second hour.
Mar 7th – Field trip to Brother Becker’s lab at BYU and the BYU tree tour
Mar 14th – In-class field trip to Canyon Glen Park. Erik, from Making Tracks, will be teaching us about animal tracking and bird language. If you want to learn about bird language BEFORE the 14th, you would do well to read “What the Robin Knows” by Jon Young. This is one of my very favorite books! I believe Erik was once one of Jon’s students, or at least he was a student of one of Jon’s students. That book is on the book list, so you can read it and write a reaction paper for it if you’d like.
For this field trip you MUST have a waiver signed. I will email you all that information privately.
Mar 21st – Cameron, Elizabeth, Shawn mini lessons – Sister Mock takes second hour
Mar 22nd – FRIDAY – ALL DAY optional field trip to Little Grand Canyon. More details coming.
Homework items:
CREATE a layout of your yard. You don’t have to make it EXACTLY to scale, but the closer, the better. You can use mine as an example, although obviously all our lots look different.
THEN use the other poster I gave you to draw your house, all the poured cement, and the boundary lines of your yard/lot WITHOUT any of the landscaping – so no trees, no bushes, no garden, no pathway, no fences, no gates, etc. Like so…
STUDY and RESEARCH all about food forests. The more you know, the easier it will be to complete our project in class next week. You will want to have a VERY solid understanding of the principles behind and the benefits of food forest. Also, you will need to understand the 7 layers of a food forest (sometimes there are 9 depending on who you are talking to.) Next week in class you will be drawing your yard as a food forest. You will need to take into account all the things you’ve learned about food forests as well as have a handy list and an idea of what trees, shrubs, plants, herbs, ground cover, and vines you will be “planting.”
YOU ARE WELCOME TO BRING A LAPTOP OR CELL PHONE WITH INTERNET TO CLASS TO CONTINUE YOUR RESEARCH – but you’ll be WAY faster in class if you’ve already done the research at home.
Here are a few links/resources to get you going. This should be enough, but feel free to branch out find other resources as well.
https://extension.usu.edu/cwel/native-other
https://www.unps.org/index.html
Plus, there are a lot of resources online for finding which trees, plants, etc. work well here in Utah. You are not limited to what I’ve posted here.
BRING your rough draft plan of you food forest plus both of your posters to class this week. If you have specific art supplies you like to use, bring those also. We’ll be raiding the supply closet for all those art supplies as well. And after Ivan and Liberty give their mini lessons, we’ll dive right in to reforesting our backyards!
Just for FUN…
Utah has a Native Plant Society that has been going strong for over 40 years. This link will take you to their spring newsletter. It’s pretty interesting! Plus, their rare plants meeting is coming up in early March up in Salt Lake City. I’m sure they would be THRILLED to see teenagers there.