It was the last Monday of the school year. (This is our last week, but Monday was a holiday.) And I was co-teaching a biology class. (Well, only for two periods. For the other three, I was the only teacher of a special ed science class.)
When I saw the lesson, I knew I had to write about it, if only for Bookworm at Ramblin' with AM.
They were doing a pre-lab. The lab was the next day, and they needed to be ready.
They were going to do an ornithological survey of the campus. That means birds. They were going to be looking for birds.
Mr. B gave a lot of preliminary instructions. The first of which was that the students needed to wear good walking shoes the next day as they'd be covering the whole campus for an hour.
Mr. B had given them a list of birds that he knew to be on campus. (He told me before class that one of them had a nest on campus the previous year, but they had not returned. He planned to show them where that was when they were out.)
For each bird, they were to look up it's habitat, what it eats, where it generally lives, what it looks like, and what it's call sounds like. He directed them to the Audubon Society's guide to birds.
For "what it's call sounds like", the students were to listen to the calls on the website, and then describe it in their own words.
The room filled with bird call sounds. Mr. B rather enjoyed that. (Of course, it also meant the students were on task.) Students questioned how to describe the sounds.
"It kind of sounds like those dogs you find at the swap meet," one girl said.
"You get dogs at the swap meet?" Mr. B asked.
"You know, those toys that you pull..."
Then we both knew what she was talking about, and I thought it an apt description.
The students had various descriptions. And because they were freshmen, they had to run them by us to make sure they were okay. There was the one that sounded like a bird rapping. There were a lot of "squeaky toy" descriptions. One boy said the call sounded like a jackhammer. We approved all of these, as that's what the calls sounded like to them.
It was late in the period. A student played a bird call...
Mr. B: "Who's still on Cooper's Hawk?"
That was the first bird on the list. They should have been way past it by then.
Yeah, Mr. B knew all the bird calls. He's done this a few times before. I was kind of sad that Ms. A returned the next day as I would have enjoyed tagging along on this lab. Oh well.
That actually sounds like a fun lesson. I don't think something like that would work around here. There's no way the schools are big enough, and no one not in gym class is allowed outside anymore.
ReplyDeleteI would have loved to have been a student in that classroom for that lesson. Even now, because many of your birds are different than ours and I would have learned a lot! Alana aka Bookworm.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had gotten a digital copy of that guide as I would have loved to list some of the birds on his list. We could hear one of them just outside the classroom as it had a nest under the eaves just a bit away. I never thought about how many birds are on campus, but it is a considerable amount.
DeleteI knew as soon as Alana’s name was mentioned what the lesson was about! He sounds like a really great teacher.
DeleteHe reminds me so much of my brother. It's wild.
DeleteSounds like a fun class. When you wrote they needed to be wearing walking shoes I thought you were going to write about some of them wearing heels that day! But, then Bookworm is more interested in birds, I think! Maybe not.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what they wore. Although, most freshman girls don't wear heels to school. We're pretty much a sneakers campus. Considering some of the walkways, more than one girl would twist an ankle on a normal day.
DeleteI don't know my birds.
ReplyDeleteCoffee is on and stay safe.
I'm terrible with bird calls. I had a bird guide book so I could look up birds I saw, but I would never be able to identify them by sound.
ReplyDeleteThat Audubon site had recordings of bird calls. I doubt I'd remember them, though.
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