University Department Donates $10,000 for Schoolyard Habitat

University Department Donates $10,000 for Schoolyard Habitat

RICE NEWS
December 2, 1999

Ensuring that young students find opportunities to observe and discover nature and biology, Rice’s Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, through funding from a special grant, has donated $10,000 to the Rice School/La Escuela Rice to build and maintain a schoolyard habitat.

The fenced schoolyard habitat will feature a shallow pond as part of a wetlands habitat, as well as a prairie and woodlands area and a vegetable garden.

Educational projects for all students, from kindergarten through eighth grade, will make use of the habitat through coursework, including making observations, drawing, writing about findings and conducting water quality experiments.

Under construction now, the habitat is expected to be fully completed by the end of the school year.

One of the Rice School teachers, Teresa Phillips, is overseeing construction of the project and developing appropriate activities for integrating the schoolyard habitat into the Rice School/La Escuela Rice curriculum.

Nanda Kirkpatrick, director of pre-college science education programs at Rice University, has been involved in planning the project since 1995.

Kirkpatrick led brainstorming sessions, and the habitat idea kept rising to the top. “There is widespread support for this project, people still want it,and now we’re able to make it a reality,” Kirkpatrick said.

The funding for the habitat project was made possible by Rice’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Biological Sciences Education Program grant.