CICERO – Morton Freshman Center biology teacher Kevin O’Toole has never seen any group of students so excited about a project in all his years of teaching. That’s because his students created a butterfly garden to help save monarch butterflies, as the population of the species continues to decline worldwide.
And while 115 students did all of the research, design and engineering of the garden, nearly 200 students, staff, family members and community volunteers pitched in to plant the garden April 28 on the school campus in Cicero.
O’Toole described the day of planting as “awesome.” He said the garden is done, and now, they just have to wait for the flowers to bloom and the plants to grow.
“It was a huge success. Actually seeing this come together was mind-blowing,” he said. “The kids worked on this all year, and seeing their smiles on Saturday was something I’ve never seen before.”
The 5,000-square-foot garden, which is called the Citizen Science Monarch Butterfly Ecological Engineering Project, contains milkweed, which monarchs need to lay eggs, as well as 40 species of native plants and five trees.
O’Toole said the population of the butterflies, which migrate from Mexico north to Canada, began to decline in the mid-1990s with the widespread use of GMO crops that are resistant to pesticides. Milkweed is not resistant to pesticide, so once it began dying off, the monarchs did not have anywhere to lay eggs, he said.
“It’s about connecting kids with nature," O’Toole said. "It’s important to start planting native plants because we’re losing so many species. If we can bring the monarch back, we can bring other species back."
The students were put into groups of four, and each group designed a garden. The students voted on which design they liked the best, and Lizbeth Sanchez’s was the winner. The 15-year-old freshman said the garden turned out exactly like she wanted it to.
“The pathways, the flowers, the pond – everything looks just like my sketch,” she said. “It was cool to work on [the garden], and I like how the community came together to work on it. We learned a lot about monarchs, and I think the garden will help them. It’s beautiful and has a lot of varieties of plants.”
Diana Solis, 14, also drew the design for her group that didn’t win. But that didn’t matter to the freshman because she enjoyed working on the project and said she learned a lot.
“Normally, you’re just sitting in a classroom, but with this project, you understand what you’re learning,” she said. “We learned the same curriculum in a different way. It’s a new way of learning, and I hope to do it again. The garden is unbelievable.”
This was the first time any of O’Toole’s classes had done a project like this. He said he wanted to try an experiential way of teaching, where the students had a hands-on experience instead of just memorizing facts. He wants to do a similar project every year, and he is encouraging other teachers to follow suit.
“They’re so energetic. They loved actually doing something for the Earth,” O’Toole said. “I was blown away by these students. They feel a sense of pride that they’re actually contributing. Whenever we’d go out in the garden [to work on the project], if they saw a monarch, they’d get so excited and chase them and try to take pictures.”