Blue Ridge Elementary School, Lakeside, Arizona
We live in a very beautiful part of Arizona. We live in the mountains at about 7,000 feet above sea level. The area is full of beautiful trees, ponderosa pines, junipers, cedars, and gamble oak trees. We have four seasons and people travel from all over the state to enjoy our beautiful area.
We wanted to compare our school with areas very different from ours. We decided to choose one in the United States, and one in another country. We chose Layer Elementary School in Winter Springs Florida, because they were the first school to contact us and the students sounded very interesting. Then we looked to see where it was and thought it sounded like an interesting place. We had some similar experience with natural disasters causing serious problems in our communities.
One of the boys in our class went to Italy this summer to see the country and visit relatives. He told us a lot of interesting things about Italy and how beautiful of a country it was. So we were interested in finding a school from that country. We choose to compare our area to the International School of Florence in Tuscany, Italy.
All three areas have ants spiders and flying bugs. All of the areas had small rocks and dirt. We have some litter and so did Florida. Florence didn’t have any, we found out that there are very strict recycling laws in Italy. The school in Winter Springs, Florida, had a lot more insects and a frog, we think it is because there is a lot more moisture there.
Grass was in all of the areas. Florida and our area had seemed to have a lot more types of trees. Florida did because they have a lot of moisture. We have a lot of different plants because we live where two types of forests join, a pine tree forest, and a forest where trees loose their leaves. Both Florida and we have oak trees, but Florida has a lot of different trees than us. Italy has olive trees, it is too cold for them here.
We have a lot of different wild flowers and that wasn’t really on the list. In our area we had wild flowers in the daisy family, sunflower family, wild asters, golden rod, and lobelia. The colors were white, yellow, purple, and red. An exciting discovery was bear scat.
We enjoyed observing our area, we did much more than our squares. It was fun comparing our area to other places in the world. It was a great project for 3rd graders.
