Former GK-12 Fellow Susan Magnolia finds rapid evolution in prairie restoration plants at the GLBRC. Read about her story, here: https://lter.kbs.msu.edu/2018/01/magnoli/

K-12 Partnership teacher Jamie Bowman is named in a new book by a former student, who made a strong impression during her early education. The full article is below, taken from the Thornapple Kellogg Schools webpage (http://www.tkschools.org/apps/news/show_news.jsp?REC_ID=454025&id=0):

Amy Purdy, an actress, writer, inspirational speaker, and famed “Dancing with the Stars” competitor, wowed millions with her will and determination to compete even after having both legs amputated. In her new book, Purdy remembers one special teacher – Jamie Bowman – a TKMS teacher for 15 years.

Thornapple Kellogg Middle School teacher Jamie Bowman has a new favorite book containing a very personal message.
Bowman’s former student Amy Purdy acknowledges a special connection with her one-time elementary teacher in her new book “On My Own Two Feet: From losing my legs to learning the dance of life.”

Bowman was in her first year of teaching in a Las Vegas elementary school. Purdy, who as a double amputee danced her way into the hearts of millions appearing in the 18th season of “Dancing with the Stars,” was one of Bowman’s first students.

“I’m honored to think I mattered enough to her in some way that she remembered me after all these years and mentioned me in her book,” said Bowman. “It’s really amazing what she’s done with her life.”

Purdy was just 19 years old when she contracted a form of bacterial meningitis. Doctors gave her about a 2 percent chance of survival. She lost both her kidneys, her spleen and both legs below the knee, but she’s surviving and thriving in a life she never could have imagined.

She’s a bronze medalist adaptive snowboarder from the 2014 Paralympic games. She ran “The Amazing Race” in 2012. She’s an actress and model. She’s co-founder of Adaptive Action Sports and a spokesperson for the Challenged Athletes Foundation. She appeared in a Toyota commercial that aired during the 2015 Super Bowl and drove the Toyota pace car for the Daytona 500.

She also joined Oprah Winfrey on Oprah’s “The Life you want to Live” tour.

In her book, Purdy writes on Page 11 about her third grade teacher, Miss Bowman.

“My other favorite subject was art. I could paint and get so lost in my head that I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. “That’s fantastic, Amy,” my fourth-grade art teacher, Miss Bowman, would say after I finished a drawing. She was the sweetest, most down-to-earth teacher I’d ever met. She also had a daughter around my age, and along with a few other kids from school we would sometimes have sleepovers at her place. “Hello, my dear! She’d exclaim whenever I visited. To be honest, I was better friends with Miss Bowman than I was with her daughter. She was creative: She spun her own wool and made sweaters and blankets. She had goats. And she was from Michigan, which sounded fascinating to me, simply because it wasn’t Nevada.”

Bowman says it was actually third grade, not fourth, but vividly remembers the young Purdy. “She was just a really sweet girl – a real go-getter.” Bowman has knitted a hat from her own sheep wool and plans to send it to Purdy with a heartfelt letter.

It was years since Bowman knew anything of Purdy or her parents. But one day she heard a familiar voice on the television.

“There was a show on called “How to Raise an Olympian” and I heard this voice I instantly recognized. It was Amy Purdy’s mother. It’s funny, but I knew that voice immediately,” said Bowman. “I didn’t know any of what had happened to Amy at all. It just made me sick.”

After that, Bowman was one of Purdy’s biggest fans when Purdy competed on “Dancing with the Stars.” She connected with Purdy’s Mom on Facebook. Then she learned of the mention in the book that came out in December 2014.
As a teacher, Bowman said she loves hearing from and about former students. Mostly, she admits, she loses track after they leave her classroom. “Yes, I might see some of them who stay around the community, but most of them I lose track of after a while. This is really special to me as a teacher. To know I made some small difference is what matters.”
Bowman is now in her 28th year of teaching and her 15th year at Thornapple Kellogg Schools. She said she’s thrilled to know she made a connection with Purdy and hopefully many other students throughout her career.

“The goal as a teacher is that you want to help make the world better. To think I had even a tiny bit in this for Amy just makes me feel really good,” said Bowman.

GK-12 Fellow Bonnie McGill was presented with a brand new award last Tuesday, November 18, at a town hall meeting of the Environmental Science and Policy Program at MSU. ESPP director Jinhua Zhou presented Bonnie with the ESPP Outstanding Service Award in recognition of her attendance and participation in ESPP seminars and research symposiums over the last two years and her contributions to the program through volunteering to help at events and serving on the research colloquia planning committee.  Bonnie is the first person to receive this new award. Congratulations, Bonnie!

Learning about hydroponics at the 2014 Summer Institute

The KBS K-12 partnership cordially invites you to our fall 2014 workshop! The theme is Co-evolution and Cross-cutting Concepts and will be held on Wednesday, November 12. As usual, the schedule will run from 8 AM to 4 PM.

Below you’ll find our daily agenda (pending) well as details on our plenary sessions and concurrent sessions. Events will continue to update as we develop content. Please rsvp to Sarah at bodbyl@msu.edu if you plan to attend. We look forward to seeing you!

*Agenda Drafts (click to view):

Concurrent Session Abstracts: 

Not in my stream: The Asian Carp invaders. With Bonnie McGill, Di Liang, & Dani Fegan, Stack 138, Elementary. First, we will introduce students to the concept of food webs and invasive species—we will frame this concept using examples from around the world (including species native to North America that are invasive in other places, like goldenrod).  Then we will introduce the Asian Carp, an invasive species that could become a threat to the Great Lakes watershed.  Students will color a worksheet that shows an aquatic food web with and without Asian Carp.  We will discuss what differences they find and how those differences could have ecological and social effects beyond the scope of the worksheet.  Next we will discuss with the students how plants and animals are not static, that is, they can change their strategies to adapt to changes in their environment.  To illustrate this point, we will give students a board game they will play in pairs where native species will compete against Asian Carp to get to the “survival” finish line.  We will keep track of which species wins among each pair to use as a springboard for discussion of different potential ecological consequences when Asian Carp compete with native species.

Coevolving with crossbills: a tale of two pinecones. With Susan Magnoli, Andy Booms & Brendan O’Neill, Stack 140, MS/HS. Interactions between species can lead to coevolution. Even the interactions we observe in our own back yards, be they predator-prey interactions, species competition, or mutualism, can lead to two species reciprocally affecting each other’s evolution. In this session, we will learn about species interactions that lead to evolutionary arms races, using coevolution between crossbills, lodgepole pines, and red squirrels as an example. The session includes an activity to illustrate coevolution in action and a graphing activity.

Why do species cooperate? A card-based simulation of the ant-acacia mutualism. With Emily Dittmar, Pat Hanly, and Amanda Charbonneau, Stack 141, Late MS/HS. This lesson uses a card game to teach how coevolution can lead to both exploitative and cooperative relationships between species in nature. Using the ant-acacia system as a guiding example, pairs of students will simulate being either ant or acacia populations that are vying for the most resources for reproduction under different environmental conditions. As they play, students will record and graph the proportion of their respective populations that are either exploitative or cooperative to visualize how the traits of their populations are evolving. At the end of the lesson, groups will share the results of their simulations with the class to compare the coevolution of cooperation occurring across populations experiencing different selective pressures.

Session 2: 11:15                     NGSS ‘Patterns’                         

Earth Sciences: Earth, Moon, & Solar System. With Marty Green, Marie Toburen & Russ Stolberg. Stack 138, EL/MS. The purpose of our session is to look at the NGSS cross-cutting concept of patterns and demonstrate how students can learn about patterns in the classroom during the study of Earth Science. Teachers will share sample lessons, activities, and assessments that help students use and make sense of patterns to build understandings.

Life Sciences: From dichotomous keys to finding differences in DNA. With Jill Withey & Elizabeth Bauer. Stack 140, Late EL/HS, with adaptation to MS. Part 1: As kids become aware of the world around them, they begin to sort and categorize and make generalizations about what they see.  The purpose of this lesson is to make classification logical. We will look at how a dichotomous key works, practice using various keys, then discuss scenarios where scientists might use this tool.  If there is time, we will brainstorm how teachers may apply this in their own districts with available plants/wildlife. Part 2: Transitioning to high school learning, we’ll do two activities which allow students to compare sequences of DNA to identify mutations responsible for changes in mouse coat color and analyze the amino acid data to draw conclusions about common ancestry.

Physics: Is your laptop making you sterile? Modeling waves and energy. With Shaun Davis & Liz Ratashak. Stack 141, MS/HS. Part 1: The objective of this high school lesson is to evaluate the validity and reliability of claims in published materials of the effects that different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation have when absorbed by matter. Part 2: We’ll be looking at middle school NGSS performance expectations regarding waves. Specifically, we will explore ways to use mathematical representations to describe a simple model for waves that includes how the amplitude of a wave is related to the energy.

Session 3: 1:30 PM

Ping Pong, Zombies, and Influenza: Let’s Build a Model! With Anne-Marie Hoskinson & Diane Ebert-May. Terrace Room. MS/HS. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) claim that K-12 students – especially middle- and high-school students – should be able to build models to make explanations and predictions of phenomena. What does it mean to build a scientific model – and can young people really do that in rich, non-trivial ways? This session is designed to give participants a taste of what scientific models are, what they do for our students, and how we can think about teaching this scientific practice. You’ll have a chance to build your own models and brainstorm with colleagues about the many possible applications of models across all the sciences. We will discuss how to find and create substantial, non-trivial scenarios, Then, using a series of fun, accessible, but important scenarios, we will begin to develop a systematic approach to teaching scientific modeling in our science and math classrooms. I will also introduce a professional-learning opportunity tentatively beginning in summer 2015 focused on learning and teaching scientific modeling for MS & HS teachers. You’ll never think about a ping-pong ball or the flu the same way after this workshop!

Not in my stream: The Asian Carp invaders. With Bonnie McGill, Di Liang, & Dani Fegan, Stack 138, Elementary.

Coevolving with crossbills: a tale of two pinecones. With Susan Magnoli, Andy Booms & Brendan O’Neill, Stack 140, MS/HS.

Why do species cooperate? A card-based simulation of the ant-acacia mutualism. With Emily Dittmar, Pat Hanly, and Amanda Charbonneau, Stack 141, Late MS/HS. 

Plainwell students learn about the wetland soils at PCCI on the geology hike

On October 2, over 90 students from Plainwell middle school’s STEM academy visited the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Education. K-12 partnership and STEM teachers Lisa Wininger, Heather Damick, and Momoko Montgomery teamed up with GK-12 Fellows Di Liang and Bonnie McGill, plus PCCI educator director (and former KBS K-12 partnership coordinator) Sara Syswerda to lead students through activities on PCCI grounds. Students were split into three groups and rotated through three activities: water sampling, macroinvertebrate sampling, and a geology hike.

A student shows off a very large leech from the retention ponds

During the water sampling activity, students were trotted down to the beautiful Cedar Creek and were guided through sampling of water temperature, flow rate, pH, and dissolved oxygen. Leader Sara S. engaged the students with lots of questions and hypothesis formation on how the creek’s abiotic factors contributed to the diversity of animals that could be found there.

Water sampling of Cedar Creek with Sara Syswerda, education director at PCCI.

On the geology hike, the students learned how the Pierce Cedar Creek watershed was formed by glaciation long ago. One of the most interesting revelations was that a large, circular hill, called a kame, in the middle of the property was caused by sedimentation deposited at the base of a huge waterfall in the glacier long ago.

Enjoying the beautiful fall weather!

Perhaps the students’ favorite activity was the macroinvertebrate sampling in the retention ponds near the visitors’ center parking lot. Tons of wriggling and squirming critters including tadpoles, water boatman, dragonfly nymphs, frogs, and a plethora of leeches were counted and identified. Considering the volume and diversity of critters found in dip net samples, the students concluded that the PCCI retention ponds were very healthy!

All participants in the field trip thoroughly enjoyed the day! Thanks to all who made such a wonderful and educational visit possible.

Fellow Di Liang shepherds students back on to the bus for the return trip to Plainwell.

Former GK-12 Fellow Tyler Bassett’s research on prairie restorations was recently featured in the August edition of the KBS e-Station to Station newsletter. Check out the short article HERE, as well as other news and events currently happening at KBS.