We offer the program twice each week: Once for kids entering grades 2-3, and again for kids entering grades 4-6. The topic and contents for both versions of the program are more or less the same, but we may adjust activities to make them more age-appropriate for each age group. We also require advance registration and generally limit the program to 20 kids - more than that and the group gets to be a bit too large and unmanageable as we cannot provide enough individual attention during these focused activities. The program lasts a total of 75 minutes.
Last week was my first opportunity to lead the program. Our topic for the week was nocturnal animals. We started out with a discussion about the owl and how this animal is specially equipped to hunt at night with it's sharp hearing, keen eyesight, and sharp claws. This then lead into a talk about what kinds of animals owls like to eat, as well as a talk about owl digestion.
Did you know that owls swallow their prey whole? They then digest the fleshy bits and spit up everything that they cannot digest - fur, bones, etc. - in a matted ball that we refer to as a pellet. Our first hands-on activity was to actually dissect one of these pellets and find the bones of whatever creature the barn owl in question might have eaten. I assigned each kid a partner to work with and before we even touched a pellet I asked them to guess how many bones they would find inside their pellet. I had them write out their answers and then post them on the wall so we could remember our guesses later. The picture below shows the guesses made by the 4th-6th graders. The younger group's guesses were much, much lower.
Then I passed out pellets and the groups got straight to work. Some might be interested to know that we purchased the pellets for this program from Copernicus Toys. The pellets came from barn owls and were sterilized to remove the threat of any bacteria. Even with this precaution most of the kids - even those few who had done this activity elsewhere before - were a little grossed out by the pellets. But the feeling passed and most got over the ick factor after a few minutes. We provided toothpicks and tweezers to help the kids pull the matted fur from the bones and I found a chart online that we used to identify what exactly each bone was, though not what kind of animal it came from.
Next we moved on to a very simple craft project: Clothespin Bats. We purchased an Ellison Die which was used to cut out the wing and body shapes. The kids then glued the pieces to a clothespin. Voila! After the craft we moved tables and chairs to clear an open space in the middle of the room to prepare for our final activities.
The activity described next was done with the older group only. The older kids had an easier time getting focused during the owl pellet dissection so they finished more quickly and had time for an activity that we couldn't do with the younger kids. We spent a little bit of time talking about bats and how they are adapted to hunt and otherwise function at night. Naturally, we talked about echolocation. Using this technique, bats send out an ultrasonic signal. They wait for the sound to hit and object and bounce back. The bat can then interpret this echo to identify what the object is and how far away it is.
To demonstrate this unique ability, we played a game that I have dubbed Bats and Moths. The rules of the game are similar to Marco Polo. One child was assigned to be the bat and was blindfolded. Four or five other kids got to be moths and were given shaker eggs with which they could make noise. All of the other kids got to be trees in the forest, forming a ring around the play space. The bat was allowed to clap his/her hands, which represents the bat's ability to send out an ultrasonic signal. In response, the moths had to shake their shakers. The bat's goal is to use this noise to find and "catch" (ie, tag) at least one of the moths. Should a bat wander too close to the edge of the play space, the nearby trees needed to say "tree" (a signal different from the one sent by the moths) to help the bat maneuver in its environment. I also insisted that this be a walking game for safety's sake since we weren't in a huge room. We played several rounds of this game so that each kid had a chance to be either a bat or a moth, and they would have been happy to continue playing for much longer if I had let them!
To conclude the program, we recapped some of the information we had learned and also learned a bit about some other nocturnal animals with a trivia game. The format of the game was identical to the one used in my Titanic program a few months ago. Just like before, I divided the kids up into teams and gave each team colored cards with the answers to all of the questions I might ask. When I asked a question, each team had to search for the correct answer and send it along with a runner across the room to sit in a chair. Each chair was assigned a different number of points. If a team answered correctly they gained the points assigned to that chair. If they answered incorrectly, however, they lost that many points. The great thing about this game is its flexibility. It doesn't require players to have any previous knowledge about the subject at hand, it can be cut short quickly if we run out of time, and we could also use many of the questions as springboards to even more discussion about nocturnal animals.
This was a jam-packed program, but the kids all seemed to have a lot of fun. And I got to learn quite a bit about nocturnal animals myself in the process! Did you know that owls can't roll their eyes in their sockets? That's why their necks are adapted to spin almost all the way around. And did you know that bats have a skeletal structure nearly identical to that of humans? The bones in their wings are actually just like humans' finger bones. It's fun when you can share fun facts like this with a group of kids eager to get their hands dirty.
No comments:
Post a Comment