Introduction
Before I was a classroom teacher, I was an environmental educator on the Hudson River in Yonkers, NY. I pursued this career in particular because of the ways that it combined my love of teaching with my love of the outdoors, and it allowed me to engage with the local community in place-based nature programming. In moving from the outdoor classroom to the formal classroom, I found an even more powerful way to share a love of learning and foster more purposeful care of the natural world. One aspect of the natural world that is abstract, and often difficult to teach, is the many ways in which systems and cycles exist in nature. An example of an interconnected system is pollination, which is vital to global biodiversity and health, let alone food supply, medical fields, climate impacts, and more. Students in grades K-2 study pollinators in various forms in Virginia, but there are few resources in the curriculum used at my school that help students understand the ways in which pollinators function as a vital component in the health of local ecosystems. In this curriculum unit, I plan to use a One Health approach to teach my kindergarten students about pollination so that they are able to articulate its structures, functions, participants and behaviors in an age-appropriate way. While this scientific content knowledge itself is essential, it is also important to me that my students take away an essential understanding that as humans, we are not superior to the natural world—we must function equitably alongside other living things in order to maintain our own health, and the health of the natural ecosystem as a whole. Within the One Health model, we must focus on the health of the entire system because all living organisms are interdependent on one another. By focusing on these aspects, I hope to both improve my students’ pollination systems knowledge, and action-plan realistic ways that we can support our health of our local pollinators at the school and community levels.
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