Reflective Essay on CBL Activities

During fall term of this class, we have occasionally engaged in some Community Based Learning activities outside the classroom. The first activity that my class took part in this year was the class trip to professor John Sollinger’s cabin. We have also gone to the greenhouse to work in it and we have held a plant sale. I have found these Community Based Learning activities to be fun, informative, and very engaging.
Going to professor Sollinger’s cabin has been my favorite Community Based Learning activity that I have taken part in this year. It was a fun way to learn, while bonding with classmates and make new friends. Our mission for this class trip was to collect plants, plant cuttings, and seeds that are native to the area. I was in the seed-collecting group. I learned allot about native plants doing this; I learned many plant names, what they look like and what their seeds look like. Some plant seeds were very easy to find, such as acorns, rose hips and snow berries. I found that the plant seeds that were the most valuable, were also the most difficult to find. My challenge was to find the hard-to-find seeds. I had some success when I found a couple of plants with seeds on them that I have never seen before. This class trip was a fun way to learn some information about plants.
The second Community Based Learning activity for this class was going to the greenhouse. Our objective of the trip was to take what we had previously collected at the cabin, and plant what was ready to be planted. We cut the plant cuttings smaller, took the leaves off (so that moisture wouldn’t escape from the cutting) and put them into soil in hopes that they would grow roots become their own plants. This trip taught me more about gardening and plants, which ties into the curriculum of our class.
The most reasent Community Based Learning activity that we had was the plant sale. The objective of the plant sale was to make money to fund a class trip that we will take latter in the year. We did not make much money from this plant sale but we learned what we can do to have more success for plant sales in the future.
I have found the Community Based Learning activities that we have had to be fun, engaging and very informative. I feel that I have benefited from them very much. I hope that we have many more in the future.