Science educators of all ages and backgrounds are generally interested in the Aquariums and Zoos of the cities they visit. New Orleanians are proud of the wonderful top 10 facilities they have with the Audubon Nature Institute’s Audubon Zoo and Aquarium of the Americas. The recovery efforts following Katrina were absolutely heroic. A stroll through [...]
March 20, 2009, will be the 40th anniversary of the publication of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a book loved by children for its parade of fanciful food, by parents for the healthy eating message, and by all for the artwork with splendid colors. Are your students interested in the lifecycles of insects? Observing [...]
Children often do not think of invertebrates as animals. If we can train ourselves to talk about insects and other invertebrates not as “bugs” but as “small animals” we’ll help children make that connection. Visiting small animals, such as isopods (aka roly-polies or pill bugs) and slugs, allow observations to build into a body of [...]
Two particularly inquisitive and bright former preK students (siblings) unexpectedly attended a workshop I gave for early childhood teachers about bringing local butterflies into the classroom for observation. Instead of distracting from the planned workshop, they added to it and made me look good! It was gratifying to have them model how to ask questions, [...]
In the fall we may begin to see more spiders in our houses and schools. Why is that? Are they moving indoors as the weather cools? The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture dispels this myth with some spider facts. Interesting how children are drawn to the models of spiders on the light table but [...]
The importance of being scientifically literate, that is, being able to sift through the information and decide what seems likely to be true, was brought home (literally) to me this month when I discovered a “colony” of bed bugs in our house. Colony sounds so much nicer, more David Attenborough, than the word “infestation”. While [...]
Last August I had four monarch butterfly larvae chewing up milkweed leaves on my kitchen windowsill as fast as I could provide them. The caterpillars were borrowed from the elementary school habitat as eggs to show to children in a workshop in a few weeks. Well, they hatched before the workshop so I showed the [...]
