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Year 2000-2001
Edgewood School
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Grade 3: Sue Cohen
As she states in her introduction, Ms. Cohen based her unit, “Birds, Beaks, and Beyond,” on the fact that, “Students who attend Edgewood Magnet School are fortunate in that they are able to study science and nature in the ‘living laboratory’ of Edgewood Park. Birds are among the most visible of species in the Park, thus providing ample opportunity for student observation.”
 “Kids did all this open-ended stuff, and did so much research on their own… . They started drawing their own conclusions about what I had in mind that I wanted them to learn. Then from those generalized conclusions, they took it back to specifics. I wanted them to learn that all birds have different beaks… . So now the kids look at a picture of a bird, and…they don’t come and tell me what color it is, they tell me what kind of beak it is… . What they really liked doing was using the field guides, because now they weren’t just turning page to page to page; they actually learned how to use the field guides… . They always knew the word “habitat” but now they know the word, “range”… . I liked the idea that there were books for more advanced students as well as the less capable, or those who needed more simplified text… . I was afraid that when I asked them to sketch birds, they’d say, “I can’t draw a bird”, but some of my less capable kids came up with amazingly detailed visual descriptions of the bird… . Because we had these specimens, and we knew that we were going to have these hands-on things to teach, it focused our research for preparing our lessons in a different way, and it made our lessons more focused.”
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Grade 3: Sue Matican
Ms. Matican’s class had a chance to play sleuth in her engaging unit, “Hide and Seek: Be An Animal Track Detective.” The aim of her lessons was to “heighten the students’ awareness of the relationship and interdependencies of the animal and human world and our environment.”
“The more able kids would take different resources as cross references. They had all the materials laid out in front of them, and they were absolutely certain, because they’d gotten all this evidence. And they were … really using the resources. It didn’t really matter whether they were totally accurate or not—it was the process, the discovery, it was the inquiry, it was putting it all together. That was really exciting to watch—especially in their little white lab coats… . They made stamps and they made cards about the animals. They made track pictures and then wrote a story about what you could learn from the track—and then challenged their classmates, ‘Look at the picture. What do you think is happening?’ And they tried to figure out each other’s stories. ... They’ve just become much more aware of these kinds of things in their environment, in their details… . One of my girls picked up the elephant tooth, and—just like thinking out loud, she said, ‘Oh, my God, if the tooth is this heavy, how heavy could the whole elephant be?.’
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Grades 3-5: Deirdre Prisco
With her unit, “Survivor: A Study of Animal and Plant Adaptations,” Ms. Prisco helped her students identify a survivor as more than the winner of a popular TV show. Her unit was written to help her students “develop an appreciation for the ways plants and animals have adapted to survive.”
“Because I do not have a classroom. I chose [another teacher’s] class to do my lessons with… . I just sort of said to show up, and you’ll see for yourself, and you’ll just follow along as I direct things. She just jumped right in, and…she was like one of the kids, she was so excited. When we did the teeth lesson, she went crazy over that one… . I have to say that the students helped the teachers, and the teachers helped the students… . They excited us, and we excited them, and it went back and forth, back and forth. ... It generated a lot of questions. ‘What is this?’ ‘where does this come from?’ It was the excitement of discovery—and discovering something that you can see, and touch, and hear, and taste. It’s not a picture, not a book, it’s an actual object—that’s totally a different experience… . One of my not-so-able students is so turned on to field guides, it’s unbelievable. It’s so exciting watching him. We went to the Peabody last week for the bird lesson. He saw that field guide on the cart, and he had it in his hand almost the entire time we were there. He didn’t want to put it down…looking through it, looking at the different birds, pointing out different characteristics… . And I started thinking about all these different things, too. ... It was the excitement of discovery! That’s what it is—you can discover things as an adult just as you can discover things when you’re ten years old.”
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Parents' Night at Edgewood School |
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Libary Media Specialist: Toni Vahlsing
Ms. Vahllsing decided to write her unit on a bit of unique local habitat, a saltwater marsh fed by Long Island Sound. As they investigated “Marsh Madness: or, Mystery of the Marsh,” students were asked to determine whether or not the marsh was still salty, after years of being controlled by a floodgate. With the BioAction Lab housed in her library, Ms. Vahlsing not only taught a borrowed class, she was able to experience the units of all the Peabody Fellows at Edgewood school.
“The only other science I’ve taught was…completely different…except I’ve SEEN science taught. I guess I’ve never seen teachers so excited… . Everybody was involved…all the students… involved on independent things, things that were interesting to them… . It wasn’t where everyone in the class was working on the same experiment, the same piece of something… . They were working in teams, but each team was working on their own little piece of whatever the lesson was for the day. They got to choose what materials they wanted to use, what resources they wanted to use… . I think they felt special, and they knew there were only certain classes doing this… . Actually, my cooperating teacher did more assessment than I did, and I never asked her to. She would say, ‘For homework, tell me what you learned about the marsh so far, tell me what you learned about wetlands. What do wetlands do?’ They wrote paragraphs explaining it, and we shared them at the beginning of the lesson the next day… . They felt special when you guys got the heron for us, my class did. Especially with the [little red] bow around it. … I had a student bring in a seed—or a little flower, a seedpod of some kind—and she said, ‘This grew in the marsh. Can you tell me what it is?’ Actually, it was from a tree—it was on the side of the road. But she was thinking…and she thought I would know, because I was the person who knew about marshes. She was interested, and kept asking me every day, this library media specialist…now,…the marsh specialist!”
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