Spring Visitors -

One of our Lab Families decided to check out the Outdoor Classroom this morning.

Winter in the Outdoor Classroom

Things get cold when the sun stays low in the sky.

This panorama is from our recent extremely cold spell after all that Arctic Air came south and hovered over the US.

Since then the pond has melted and frozen and melted and frozen numerous times. 

All the while the plants and animals living in and around the classroom are waiting for spring. As the days are getting longer, the sun rises higher in the sky and strikes the land more directly. The wind whispers a song  "soon...soon...soon...".  

Winter is coming.... to our Pond!

As the temperature drops, our tiny pond is cooling off faster than the larger bodies of water around Chicago. Already there have been two mornings when a coat of ice covered the pond, but life under the solid layer goes on!

Here is a short video of one of the Water Boatmen still swimming around just under the ice on the surface. A bit chilly for a few laps!

Stories around the campfire

As the weather has turned colder, we've started to adjust how we use the outdoor spaces at lab. The garden has been largely put to bed for the winter and soon the pump that feeds our stream will be taken out until spring. The plants and animals in our outdoor spaces will go dormant for the winter or head south if they can.

For us, non migratory mammals that stay active all winter, we have to adapt. Coats, hats, cocoa, fire and stories make winter more bearable. With that in mind we held our first Stories Around the Campfire day on Friday. Seventeen homerooms teachers brought their students out and listened to our librarians tell stories as the warmth of the sunshine stored inside the logs burned away in front of us.

Native Plants

Once of the goals of the Outdoor Classroom is to have plants that are native to Northern Illinois take hold and be the foundation for the ecosystem that develops in the space.

To that end, we have recently begun adding native plants in the Classroom. I'm most excited about the addition of one of the more colorfully named wetland plants. Skunk Cabbage.

Here is the flower that the Skunk Cabbage will produce in the spring:

Currently our plants look like this and will overwinter at the edge of the pond. 

 

More updates to come as there will be more plantings soon. Keep your eyes peeled for them when you visit the Outdoor Classroom.

Dragonflies have found the pond.

HERE BE DRAGONS

Tolkien’s Smaug was a terrible beast indeed. In some ways, so are the large insects that spend their adolescence underwater and bear the same name.  DRAGON.  In recent days it has become harder and harder to find our American Toad Tadpoles. At first we wondered if turning off the stream might have caused them stress and led to their demise. New evidence has come to light, however, as this week there were numerous sightings of the fierce predator in our pond.

Dragonfly Nymphs

They are large. They are quick.  They are voracious.

Currently they are at the top of the Food Web in our pond.

See if you can spot one! Or Two! Or Five!
Just In....young American Toad found by four-year-old: 

Where's the Water?

Perhaps you have noticed that our pond and stream are not totally natural.

It's true. The system we have in place is designed to mimic a naturally occurring watershed but isn't one.

Hidden beneath the stones at the Northeast edge of the pond is a small pump that continually cycles the water from the pond uphill to the beginning of the stream. The water then flows downhill, over our waterfall, and back to the pond. During this process, water will be continually evaporating, just like it does from any natural waterway.

Just like any other waterway, rains will add to the flow of our stream. In our case, rain that falls in the Outdoor classroom will enter our pond, but the watershed also includes the roof of Kovler Gym. When rains falls on the roof, it is fed into our stream through the terra-cotta colored pipe near the water fall. In periods where there is no rainfall, we can also add water from the city water supply if needed throughout the small white pipe.

Water is tenacious, and will find any way that it can to travel downhill with the pull of gravity. Any small crack in the seal under the stream and pond will be exploited and expanded by water.

This week we do not expect a rain event, so we are running a test to be sure that no such leaks are occurring. In that time, the stream pump will be shut off to minimize the amount of evaporation so we can monitor the level in the pond more closely.

Once we are confident the pond is holding the water, the pump will be engaged again, and our stream will flow once more.