Environmental Educator Regina Miller finds a lot of cool animals and plants in her backyard and nearby areas. Here are her recent cool finds. Check back here for more cool finds and check out urbanecologycenter.org/backyard for more discoveries from our staff (including a three-part video series by Regina)!

“Would you like to hold it?”, I asked the 8th-grade boy. He said “Yes” and I gently poured the spoonful of pond water that held the dragonfly larva into his hands. Ever so carefully he touched it with his fingertips and turned it around in his hand exploring it thoroughly. “Can I try another one?” he asked? He put the dragonfly larva back into the basin of pond water and I quickly scooped out a damselfly larva and poured it into his hands. Again he carefully felt and explored the small, delicate creature. After returning it to the pond water basin, he asked to try another animal. This time I scooped out a snail and poured it into his hands. Once again he thoroughly examined it. I asked him to describe the differences between these animals and he said that the snail had a hard shell and the dragonfly larva was bigger than the damselfly larva. After examining each of these animals, he asked if he could hold each one again. Over the course of the hour, he held each one of these animals multiple times and by the end, he could tell the difference between the dragonfly larva, damselfly larva, and snail. A great accomplishment for any student, but did I happen to mention that this 8th-grade boy is blind?

It was time to go pick up the kids for another fun field trip so I headed over to the nearby school in one of our buses. Once at school I waited a few minutes for the class and soon the line of little ones came walking down the hall. The group of K5 children was eager to see me and very excited about the field trip they were going on. I asked them if they knew what we were going to be learning about that day and one child eagerly responded with, “Habitats!” I told the group that we were indeed going to be learning about habitats and animal homes and then we headed to the bus to begin the adventure. On the way to the Center, each pair of children had pictures of an animal and its home and they talked with their partner about how the home helped their animal.