Native Plants of Washington's Wetlands & Woodlands

During the 2003 -2004 school year the fourth grade Applied Learning class in Portable #4 began work on a digital encyclopedia of native plants. Each student chose one example of the native flora that they were learning about in their salmon habitat restoration project. The responsibility of each researcher was to learn appearance, habitat needs, growth habits, and natural history of their chosen plant. Then students each created 4 or 5 PowerPoint slides each with the information they found plus pictures of their plants. The result was over 150 slides in a program that gave a pretty good look at the native plants these students had come to know.

In the fall of 2006 a new class began surveying native growth protection areas near our school to inventory just what native plants are present. They discovered some that were not included in the digital encyclopedia slide show. When they chose plants and began research to add to the slide show they discovered it would take too long to search through and find specific plants. A better solution was to convert the slide show information, plus information and pictures of newly studied plants, into a web site that anyone could use for information.

With the assistance of the Everett Public School Information Technology personnel the students were able to create this web site.