LIMA, Ohio (WLIO) - Seventh graders at South Science and Technology Magnet finished off their school year recently with a project to help out the environment around one part of their school's campus.
Funded by the local chapter of the Audubon Society and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, these students learned about different types of plants in class, some of the benefits they can provide for organisms the area, and received grant money to purchase those plants and get them transplanted into the soil outside of their school building.
The big focus was to help out the biodiversity of their school yard. "Biodiversity is the amount of living things in a certain area, so biodiversity in our school yard is being increased when we plant plants," said South student Preston Tyson. "Those plants bring in other things like insects, moths, caterpillars."
Some of those plants included things like wild strawberries, different kinds of grasses and flowers, and shrubs. The students themselves took time to dig out the soil and get the plant in the ground, and many of them say that it was their first time doing gardening like this.
The main goal of the process was to show that anyone can take steps to help out their immediate environment.
"We can all participate in sort of benefiting the ecosystem around us; we need a lot of things that the ecosystem can give us, and we can support that by putting native plants in our yard, in a container, in a pot, in the little strip of mulch that we've got in the backyard," said science teacher Dan Hodges. "It's a really good experience of kind of taking that home and being able to do that on our own properties."
