Mary Bomberger Brown, program coordinator of the Tern and Plover Conservation Partnership, and Milda Vaitkus, GIS project manager, attended Teacher's Night Out at the Durham Museum in Omaha on Oct. 2. This annual event is geared toward providing K-12 teachers with activities and resources for their classrooms.
"I really enjoy the face-to-face interactions with teachers in the rather relaxed 'happy hour' environment of this event," Vaitkus said. "The teachers are very appreciative of ideas and materials for activities that they can easily use and the posters they can hang up in their classrooms."
More than 1200 public, private and home-school teachers from the greater Omaha and Council Bluffs area attended the event.
This year marks the eighth year of SNR's involvement with the event. Bomberger Brown has represented SNR for all eight years. Vaitkus has joined her for the past four years.
"I first heard of the event from the head of the education department at the Nebraska History Museum," Bomberger Brown said. "SNR is one of the few 'science-y' exhibitors, so we get a lot of attention from the teachers."
At the event, Bomberger Brown and Vaitkus distribute information from their own programs, with additional materials provided by the High Plains Regional Climate Center, the Nebraska Wind Energy and Wildlife Project, the National Drought Mitigation Center, the Invasive Species Program, SNR recruiting, science literacy, CASNR 4-H and CASNR recruiting.
"The teachers are especially appreciative of the SNR materials that help them meet state curriculum standards in creative ways," Bomberger Brown said. "It's important to my tern and plover program to get educational materials where they will do the most good — into the hands of teachers and their students. The Durham event is a great way to accomplish that."
Vaitkus echoes that sentiment.
"We get return teachers who bring their 'newbie' colleagues to our table to pick up tern and plover and Satellite View of Nebraska posters," Vaitkus said. "There must be hundreds up of them up in classrooms in the Omaha and Council Bluffs area by this time."
To learn more about the Durham Museum Teacher's Night event, visit http://go.unl.edu/ga66.
— Mekita Rivas, Natural Resources