Carminati Elementary School

Tempe, Arizona, USA

          Our school is located in Tempe, Arizona.  We live very close to Phoenix, Arizona, so close that many students in our class live in Phoenix and go to school in Tempe.  Our city is located in the Sonoran Desert which is the only desert that has Saguaro Cactus.   Our squares were located right outside of our classroom door.  It is a small fenced in area that is used primarily as a green area on our campus.  It is a place that we thought we were quite familiar with since we saw it everyday but was quite surprise to find forty different living and non-living things just in our six squares.  Some of things we found very interesting were the yellow sap on the pine trees, the amount of ants crawling around the trees and ground and the rust colored seeds that had come out of the pine cones.  We also had three different kinds of trees in our square.  After some research we found out we had three Pine Trees and two Ash Trees.  Our principal told us that Ash Trees are a very popular tree to plant in Arizona because they grow fast, provide shade and can tolerate heat.

          We partnered up with Ms. Waring’s Class from Redding Elementary School in Redding, Connecticut.  We were excited to learn more about a school across the country.  One of the first things we wanted to know was did it snow there.  Since many of us have never seen snow we were excited to find out it does.  Other differences we discovered were, they live in more of a rural area, and they had been getting a lot of rain.  Some of the similarities with our school were they had a large playground with some of the same playground equipment that we had.

          Their squares were also quit different then ours.  They had chosen a place on there campus that was a garden with a pond.  The different things they found were mushrooms, a frog, and worms.  Things we have never seen on our campus.  We did have many similar items in our squares like ants, rocks, weed, grass, mud, dirt, flying and bugs.  But a couple of these items were quite different, for example some of their rocks were covered in algae and ours were just on the ground.  The mud was also created in two different ways.  Theirs was from all the rain that they had received and ours was from the watering that the custodian does on Mondays and Wednesdays.  We have had very little rain this year.

          One of the biggest conclusions we came to on why we found different things in our square then our partners at Redding Elementary was they had different weather.  We believe because they live further east, closer to an ocean and a lot further north, they get a lot more rain and snow.  We felt this explained why they found things that need a lot of water in their squares like a worm, frog, algae and mushrooms.  We felt in order for these plants and animals to survive in the desert we would have to create a pond and continually add water, because the water would evaporate very quickly.  We really enjoy participating in these activities and writing back and forth with our buddies.

Below are our project pictures.