Students in Apple Valley Middle’s Exceptional Children classes squealed when they put their hands into Team ECCO’s touch tank and horseshoe crab legs tickled their fingers.
Kortney Clark, assistant director of education at Team ECCO Ocean Center & Aquarium, picked up prickly sea urchins and told students, “They have no brain, no eyes and no blood.”
She explained, “Instead of blood, they use the salt water that runs through their body. So when we start a new tank we put them in first to see if the water’s good.” Clark said, “They’re called an indicator species.”
As students studied each tank full of fish, trying to match the species on their fish scavenger hunt papers, EC Teacher Julie Siegel said the field trip was just the first stop on a hands-on learning adventure in downtown Hendersonville.
Paid for by a Target Field Trip Grant, students also visited Kilwins to learn how fudge is made and learned about geology at the Mineral and Lapidary Museum of Henderson County.
The field trip included lessons on marine biology and career exploration at Team ECCO, and compounds and geography at Kilwins during the fudge-making process and a cocoa bean harvesting discussion. And the Mineral and Lapidary Museum was “perfect for the eighth grade science curriculum,” said Holly Kolarova, language arts teacher at Apple Valley Middle who applied for the grant.
“I wanted our students to have hands-on learning, in their own community,” Kolarova said.
(Written by Molly McGowan Gorsuch, HCPS Public Information Officer.)