First-graders get biology buddies

High schoolers help younger students along

HILLSBOROUGH -- Ashley Carter helped one first-grader fill in his graph while keeping an eye on another youngster in a velvet dress who appeared to be eating her experiment.

"Are you counting or munching?" Carter asked.

"I'm munching," the little girl said, glancing at the cocoa cereal pieces on her paper plate.

Carter, an 11th-grade student at Cedar Ridge High School, was one of 10 biology club members who woke up extra early Thursday to help teach students at Hillsborough Elementary School about birds.

"I want to be a teacher, so this is helpful to have this interaction with the kids," Carter said. "Also, when I was younger, I liked having interaction with older kids."

First-grade teacher Julia Workman approached high school biology teacher Allison Eaton with the biology buddy idea last year. Eaton's biology club was interested, and the two teachers worked out three lessons on birds.

The lesson Thursday focused on the difficulty birds have eating in a littered environment. Each group of students had a bowl of cereal containing both corn and cocoa pieces. Each student put a small scoop of the mixture on a plate and counted the kernels of corn as food and the pieces of cocoa as litter, marking the results on their graph.

It's the sort of hands-on lesson that really requires more than a teacher and a teaching assistant with children this young, Workman said. "Having [the high schoolers] here really helps [the first-graders] do it more accurately," Workman said. "Plus they think the high school kids are fantastic."

At first, Eaton wasn't sure how many high school students she could round up for a lesson that begins 45 minutes before high school starts. To her delight, she found many. This year she has about 20 students involved, and the program has expanded to include April Boutwell's first-graders next door. The club is talking about taking the project to another school next semester.

The littering lesson was preceded by one on how the bills of various kinds of birds are fit for particular kinds of food. For that one, students used tools such as pliers to pick up large nuts, spoons to scoop and tweezers to pick up small seeds stuck in Play-Doh modeling compound.

The next lesson will involve nest-building, with all the natural materials birds use, including mud.

As the high schoolers rushed off to their own school, Boutwell gathered her students in a circle. Her first-graders were eager to share their data and what it meant.

"I got 20 pieces of litter and 28 pieces of good food," Anna Treschl said.

Boutwell asked the students whether it was a good thing to have so much trash mixed with the food.

"Ewwww ... no!" the children said.

"Because they can get really sick and die," Chloe Dunn said. "Since we get food, birds should get food, too."

"We should have a pick-up-litter day at our school," MacKenzie Frank said. "What we could do possibly today, we could go on the nature trail, and if we see any litter, we could pick it up."

Boutwell said that was a great idea, one they could put into practice during recess that afternoon. She thought some of MacKenzie's classmates had good ideas, too: A bird feeder and a bird bath likely will be added outside Boutwell's classroom soon.