Henry Harris School, Bayonne, New Jersey

On October 5^th, 2007 the third grade classes went on a field trip to First Street Park to complete the Square of Life Project.  Once at the park, teams of four students measured out a meter square of earth with their strings.  Each team has hand lenses and paper to record their findings.  It was a beautiful fall day and we also had time to complete a nature scavenger hunt while we were at the park.

   Once we returned, our class worked on reporting our findings.  Students sketched out their squares and as a class we divided our data.   We classified things we found into living, non-living and animal types.  We then posted the information on the web page. 

       As a final report, we chose another community to compare our findings with.  After looking over the list we chose a class from Estonia.  Our class wanted to choose a location far away to see if the information we found was really different.  To our surprise much of what we found was the same.  As far as animals, both groups did not list many.  We had small insects and they did too.  We had more in common including grass, dirt, and litter items.  We found some of the words the Estonia class used interesting, such as Ònose-ragÓ- we figured out they meant tissue.  They also listed twitch and plantain as grasses.  We do not have that type of grass.  Our class concluded that even though Estonia was very far away, there were many things we had in common in our project.  We also concluded that litter seems to be a problem for both communities.  We had a great time working on the Square of Life Project.