It is almost time to uncover our gardens from last year to prepare for spring and summer bounty. Sometimes though we can’t do it on our own. Often, it is our FBIs that help break down old plant material to prepare for the new. We aren’t talking about law enforcement though… SPREE FBIs are decomposers and are also known as Fungi, Bacteria, Insects and Scavengers. These are the FBIs we learned about on Monday’s holiday camp.
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We started our first activity by planning a pizza- each camper added their favorite topping to our pizza. At the end, we realized that we forgot one FBIs topping- mushrooms. Mushrooms belong to the fungi kingdom along with other familiar organisms like lichen and yeast. We continued learning about fungi with some yeast experiments, mushroom art, and mushroom dissection!
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Bacteria is a harder FBIs to study because the organisms are microscopic and cannot be seen with the naked eye. So we used UV lights to study some camp surfaces. While the UV did not illuminate just bacteria, it did give us an idea of how “dirty” some surfaces were- and the dirtier the surface, the likelihood of both good and bad bacteria is high! We did some experiments comparing cleaning supplies- we cleaned a camp mat using antibacterial wipes, vinegar, and soap & water to determine the best way to keep surfaces clean for the long term is soap and water.
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We jumped into insects during our critter crawl. This jumping did not include jumping into the water- as we did our critter crawl on land due to cold weather. Teachers used a tool called a kick net to scoop macroinvertebrates from the River and bring them onto land where campers could sort and count the macros by whether they were a decomposer or not. Though crawdads aren’t insects, they are scavengers and we caught several along with some scuds, water boatmen, and mayflies.
We wrapped up the day with a group activity about scavengers. Scavengers are animals from many different families that all have one thing in common- they eat dead things! Some examples of scavengers are eagles, vultures, crawdads, and coyotes. We focused on our birds of prey scavengers, and created our own balancing scavenger birds. Campers were then challenged to balance their birds while walking through an obstacle course. We were impressed with all the different birds that were created- and the balance of their handlers!
Despite the cold weather, we had a great time learning and playing during SPREE’s FBIs holiday camp. We look forward to seeing you again down by the River!
