Battle Ground students design plans to protect butterflies

Battle Ground — Pleasant Valley Primary School third-graders in Talea Jones’ class learned how to create a healthy, protective habitat to attract endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies at their school grounds. The project was part of the yearly Science, Technology, Engineering and Math collaboration between the third grade classes at Pleasant Valley and student teachers at Washington State University Vancouver earning their K-8 masters in education degrees. The students learned to identify the native plants that serve as both food and shelter for the Pacific Northwest pollinators before heading outdoors to identify plants and make field observations in their project notebooks. In the classroom, they designed solutions that will help protect the butterflies throughout all stages of their life cycles. The students swapped notebooks and peer reviewed the work.