A native plant butterfly garden for pre-K environmental literacy and undergraduate education and research

Background/Question/Methods

In July and September 2007 over 100 perennial butterfly plants of 32 species native to southeastern Virginia were planted in a previously grassy area in front of a campus building at Hampton University (HU) in Hampton, Virginia. The idea of the Director of the HU Child Development Center for a teaching garden for her pre-K children was enlarged by the other authors—an arthropod ecologist and a botanist—to encompass undergraduate education and research. Since its inception, the garden has served in these varied capacities.

Results/Conclusions

The HU SEEDS Ecology Chapter has planted, mulched, and watered the garden; students in the sophomore botany class “adopted” individual plants to weed; and six seniors have conducted research on insect visitors and pollinators of the plants and plant phenology, which will be presented in another poster at this meeting. The pre-K children visited the garden almost daily during the late summer and autumn, made drawings of their observations and related them to the Center teachers, who wrote them down. The children constructed a butterfly life cycle after observing tiger swallowtails and spicebush swallowtails being reared from eggs indoors, and eventually being released. Teachers at the Child Development Center read books on environmental topics to their charges, as part of the Director’s environmental literacy theme. The butterfly garden is widely known on campus, and undergraduates, as well as pre-K children, are benefiting from this example of the “No Child Left Indoors” concept by hands-on learning about native plants, pollinators other than honeybees, the effect of drought, and many other ecological and entomological concepts.