Environmental Education Field Trips
 MAGC offers two field trips in our certified wildlife habitat garden, graced with ancient trees and plantings of California natives.
For a complete description of our field trips, click here.
"Exploring Habitats" Field Trips for First and Second Grades
In this popular field trip, students explore the garden in small groups with docents at four stations:
- Compost: While digging through the worm compost bin, reflect on the complete food cycle and how to build healthy soil, and understand decomposers and the soil food web.
- Woodland: Identify the trees in the garden and learn about the animals that live in the California native woodland even though we may not see them.
- Pond: Besides frogs and turtles, who else lives here? Learn how to use a magnifier and discover the unseen wonders of pond life.
- Butterfly Garden: Look at the butterflies, birds and flowers, and in the quiet of the garden pretend you are the scientist. You have just discovered this fauna or flora. What are its characteristics and what would you name it? Watch the bird feeders and see our local feathered friends.
"Pollen Nation" Field Trips for Fourth Grades
In this standards-aligned field trip new this year, students use the garden as a tool for exploring how plants and animals have co-evolved to help each other.
- Pollination ecology: Plants have evolved beautiful flowers to attract pollinators such as bees, hummingbirds, butterflies, and other insects, while these creatures have evolved special tools for extracting the rich food provided as nectar and pollen.
- Seed travelers: Plants have several strategies for dispersing their seeds, including relying on many garden animals!
- Flower and pollinator biology: What's in a flower? What makes a bee a bee?
- Stewardship: Students will learn about the overall decline in pollinators, the specific crisis affecting honeybees, and how to help protect pollinator habitat and attract pollinators to a garden.
- Seasonal, garden-related activities
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