We provide learning opportunities for students of all ages (K-12, community college, and universities). Our programs include field trips to San Bruno Mountain that combine art and writing activities, hiking, and habitat restoration service-learning opportunities. Custom-made interpretive booklets or “zines” are developed for the themes and topics of each trip, printed, and provided to each student.
Our Mission Blue Nursery also hosts school groups, engaging them in native plant propagation and botany.
Our nursery also connects school landscapes to the mountain—clubs and teachers often purchase plants for native gardens featuring the local flora of San Bruno Mountain.
Students find additional opportunities to learn with us through academic internships, capstone projects, and community service hours. Our digital learning resources also provide opportunities to learn from home. Visit our growing collection of online curriculum, exhibits, and public history archives.
We especially seek to partner with schools in the regions surrounding San Bruno Mountain, particularly Daly City, South San Francisco, Brisbane, and Colma; however, we also work with other schools spread throughout the SF Peninsula, both north and south of the mountain.
We strive to provide underserved youth with opportunities to connect with the mountain, a critical open space within a dense and urbanized region. The initial grassroots efforts to save San Bruno Mountain in the 1970s were sparked in part by demands for equitable park access through the creation of parkland in northern San Mateo County.
FEATURED EDUCATION PROGRAMS
The San Bruno Mountain Dune Defenders program involves students in ecological restoration activities on the San Bruno Mountain dunes. By removing invasive ice plant, replanting dune wildflowers, students bring back the bloom of the dunes and protect habitat for the endangered San Francisco lessingia. Students learn about plant and animal adaptations to the dune environment, coastal ecological processes, climate change and sea-level rise. The San Bruno Mountain dunes are part of the ancient coastline, formed during a prior interglacial period 100,000 years ago when higher sea-levels flooded the edges of San Bruno Mountain.
3rd grade and above.
The Mountain Creek, City Creek program provides opportunities for students to explore the Colma Creek watershed, from its headwaters on San Bruno Mountain through its urbanized channels in South San Francisco all the way to San Francisco Bay. Students explore the changing history of the watershed, learn about riparian ecology and the consequences of urbanization to creek health. Students also engage with creek restoration projects on the mountain and envision urban creek revitalization and climate adaptation projects in South San Francisco and along the bay shoreline.
6th grade and above
The San Bruno Mountain Muses program provides underserved youth with opportunities to engage in outdoor creative expression during field trips to San Bruno Mountain. Activities include participatory performances of local mountain songs, theatric storytelling at an outdoor amphitheater, land art utilizing natural materials, environmental poetry, nature journaling, and scientific illustrations of the mountain’s vegetation, wildlife, and landscapes.
K-12 and above
