Students create Seward Park field guide

Faiza Aman, 19, moved to Seattle from Ethiopia five months ago speaking no English. But after helping create a field guide for Seward Park with students from four city schools, she not only can communicate better but can rattle off facts about area birds.

About 400 students studying science at Aki Kurose, Mercer and Washington middle schools and the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center have created a field guide for Seward Park, one of the city's largest with more than 300 acres of wooded areas, trails and waterfront.

Aman, a ninth-grader at the SBOC, said she worked after school researching, writing descriptions and drawing pictures of the park's flora and fauna.

The students' work — which includes more than 400 entries in a spiral-bound book — was released Sunday and will be available for sale to park visitors for $25 each. A panel of 30 volunteer environmental experts reviewed the book before sending it to print.

Other students worked on a chapter focusing on the impacts humans have had on the park's land, even before the city bought the peninsula in 1911.

Irene Rodriguez, Aman's science teacher at SBOC, said the field-guide program, a partnership among the four schools and the recently established Seward Park Environmental and Audubon Center, has helped immerse her students in a new language and introduced them to some of Seattle's rich natural resources.

"These kids come from all over the world and aside from learning a new language, there's a lot to do and see here," she said. "These kinds of programs bring classroom material to life and lets the students actually get to see, smell and taste the Northwest."

The field-guide program is the first education initiative of the Seward Park Environmental and Audubon Center, an organization formed in 2003 through a partnership between Audubon Washington and Seattle City Parks, center director Gail Gatton said.

Three of the schools involved in the project — Aki Kurose, Mercer and Washington — were good picks for the program because they serve the neighborhood surrounding the park, Gatton said.

"This was a good place to start because this is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city," she said. "These are neighborhood kids who normally wouldn't have access to outdoor education efforts, and this is right in their backyard."

Gatton said her organization's goal is to provide outdoors education to disadvantaged children and students of color in public schools. The group has raised just more than $2 million toward a $3 million goal to renovate the park's environmental-education center, scheduled to open for summer programs next June.

"For many of them [the students], this is their first big project in English, and they're getting to know a great part of Seattle, too," said Jenni Conrad, a naturalist at the center.

Nathan Hurst: nhurst@seattletimes.com