Thomas Berry, one of the most distinguished cultural historians of our time stated, “Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives.”
Here at the Environmental Studies Center (ESC), a part of the Mobile County, Alabama, Public School System that Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant helps support, we are fully committed to providing high-quality environmental education centered around our unique upland coastal ecosystem. We provide educational services to students and citizens of Mobile County and beyond. We have put the spotlight on our high school curriculum many times, but we also serve younger students in our program.
Led by our elementary resource teacher, Tracy Delcambre, we provide programming for pre-kindergarten students through the fifth grade. These programs highlight different aspects of our area such as native wildlife, their adaptations and habitats. We also offer programming on specific animal groups, such as reptiles and birds, highlighting their characteristics.
Our pollinator program is very popular with the younger students as they get to visit our working bee hives. For upper elementary students, we have programming that goes along with their unit on Native American culture here on the coast. They get to walk along our trails and learn about how they may have survived here including the plants they may have used as medicine or food.
Our watershed program is also popular among the fifth-grade students and complements their studies. We enjoy this class because we can go a little more in depth with the issue of pollution in our waters. Our summer Mommy and Me preschool programming provides a first look at different animal groups for some of our youngest students and is a favorite activity of our summer staff.
Though we prefer place-based education where the students come to see us at the ESC, we have the capability of bringing programming to the schools. We have adapted our programming so that most of the programs we offer here on site can be translated to the outreach. This allows us to see more students at a time and is helpful when the acquisition of a bus driver to bring them to us is a problem.
It is much easier to build strong ideology when it comes to the appreciation of the environment in small children than to try and change thought patterns in adults.
We are committed at the ESC to do all we can to build a strong foundation of environmental literacy to our students. This is crucial to ensuring that we create educated citizens who will vote in the future.
We do not take this commission lightly. The future of our planet is in our classrooms today.
Our education system simply must do a better job of preparing them for times to come and we are committed to bridging that gap.
Meet the author
Sommer Calderone
Resource Teacher
Sommer Calderone is a resource teacher at the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant-supported Environmental Studies Center, part of the Mobile County Public School System, in Mobile, Alabama. In her role,... Read more
Phone: 251-221-5000
Email: [email protected]