At-Home STEM Activity Michael Conway At-Home STEM Activity Michael Conway

At-Home STEM Activities: Pollinators--What Do They Do and Ways to Attract Them

In honor of National Wildflower Week, this week’s Distance Learning offerings are focusing on the plant world.

An animal that helps plants cross-pollinate is called a pollinator, and they are an especially important for farming and for the ecosystem as a whole. In New England, the most common pollinators are bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Let’s learn about why plants need pollinators and ways we can make the outside of a home an inviting space for this essential creatures!

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At-Home STEM Activity Michael Conway At-Home STEM Activity Michael Conway

At Home for Earth Day: Make a Water Filter

Use common materials from your home and yard to make a basic water filter, and watch it work on muddy water!

Filtration is the process of separating solids from fluids using a a filter—a medium that only the fluid can pass through, leaving the solids “trapped” behind. Natural and human-made filters are all around us: paper filters keep coffee grounds out of freshly brewed coffee; HEPA filters capture dust particles in our vacuum cleaners; our kidneys even act as filters to remove harmful materials from our blood! In nature, dirt is naturally filtered out of water as the water moves through sand, soil, gravel. This is the process that we will be demonstrating today.

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