During the Spring break of 2019, science teacher Kendra Bond took a trip to Costa Rica. When asked why she decided to go, Bond says, “I had previously taken a class at Eastern about Hawaii and their environmental issues and I was really interested in a program called Ecology Project International and the opportunity came up for me to go to Costa Rica with them again, so I decided I would just go.”

    While being there, Ms.Bond experienced lots of things. For example, she states, “I worked with sea turtles, we did tissue sampling,  we looked to see if they had been chipped so we can see their patterns…if they’d been chipped multiple times. We looked in bangroves and we restored some of the bangrove patches that they have there.  We measured the plants that were already existing to see how they were developing. We went on rainforest hikes. We went on night hikes to see what kind of animals were out, what kind of species we could find.”  

    While there, she also learned all kinds of new things. She states, “I learned a lot about how to teach the scientific method in a way that makes sense to high school students, so we talked about how to formulate research questions. We talked about hypothesis’, how you can have multiple, how there are multiple ways you can write it (that way you don’t have a wrong answer per se).” Also, Bond thinks what she learned will help her in class. She says, “I do think it will help in my classroom. I learned games, topics to incorporate; I learned about conservation, environmental issues, in ways I can teach those to high school students to make them care about these things.”

    Would you want to take a trip to Costa Rica? Bond very strongly recommends it. She says, “Yes, I am supposed to be going to Belize next year, hopefully. I would recommend it for the teachers and other students. It’s a high school organization actually, and teachers just get to go to learn things to bring back to their classrooms, but it is a high school organization.”