Vision

Our vision was to educate ourselves and our community on the important roles that bees, bats and birds play in our ecosystems. We wanted to showcase these species in a new light and develop a plan to be more bee, bat and bird friendly, at our school and within our community as a whole.

Action

As a class, the Grade 5/6 students at Oak Lake Community School learned about each species and their contributions to our ecosystems. We also took note of how bees, bats and birds play an important role in human lives as well. After becoming “the experts”, students then learned about the barriers these species have and were tasked with coming up with ways that we could help.

After witnessing many birds flying into the windows of our classroom and library, students reasearched ways to prevent the bird strikes and discovered that putting decals on windows is one method that they could easily implement at school and at home. Students made their own decals using puffy fabric paint and also made decals for interested families in our school. They created instruction cards that shared their knowledge on the frequency of bird-window strikes and how to use the decals to be a part of the solution.

Recently, bats have been given a very bad reputation. Students learned all about the benefits of having bats in our environment (especially since we are located in a farming community and bats are notorious insect eaters!). To help provide bats with more places to live, students were given the opportunity to build and paint their very own bathouses! When complete, each student took their creation home to be hung and enjoyed by families of bats!

The final piece to our project is to help support our pollinators. Learning about how bees support food production was an eye opening experience for many students as they quickly made the connection, that without bees and other pollinators, there is also no food for humans. Seeds have been purchased to plant a bee friendly pollinator garden on our school grounds. Our goal is to not only support our pollinators, but to also see if the yield in our school garden increases as a result of increased pollinator visits.