Tewksbury Township resident and Voorhees High School senior, Antoinette Metzler, took her AP Biology final project one step further by creating a field guide about the plants that surround the historic farmhouse on the Voorhees High School property for her Girl Scout Gold Award submission.
In her Advanced Placement Biology class during her junior year, students were asked to research local plants, flowers or trees and their medicinal uses as the final project for the course. Antoinette chose to examine the plants that grow around the historic farmhouse.
When the gold award submission came around for Girl Scouts, which she has been a part of since kindergarten, Antoinette decided to create a field guide of her research so that it can be used by future students and visitors to the farmhouse. “My hope for the field guide is that it will be an enhancing feature of the farmhouse property. I also hope that it will be used as a learning tool for students and community members alike,” said Antoinette.
“I knew I wanted my Girl Scout project to involve my community and make it better. I chose the farmhouse because in recent years the revitalization of the property has slowed. I wanted to continue to improve the property and give it some much needed attention in hopes of heightening community members’ awareness and involvement in improvements.”
Over the last year, Antoinette took specimens from around the farmhouse and pressed them between glass panels along with the name of the specimen, where it is located in relation to the farmhouse, and its medicinal uses. Once this process was complete, she then color-coded each of the 16 glass panels so yellow represented trees, green are shrubs, blue are wetland plants, and red are ground cover. In addition to the specimens, Antoinette also created a panel with the history of the farmhouse. A permanent box is to be built at the farmhouse in order to store the field guide for all visitors to use.
As part of her Girl Scouts award submission, she also documented her visit with third graders at Tewksbury Elementary School where she taught them about organic farming and helped them create a vegetable garden. Once fully grown, the vegetables were donated to a local food pantry. Antoinette is awaiting word on whether she received the Girl Scouts Gold Award.