With the sounds of the wild all around her, the fourth-grader lifted her hand, pointed at a nearby target, and squeezed the trigger.
A gentle mist came out of the water bottle and sprayed on the second-grader’s head.
Science teacher Wendy Stevens’ class wanted not only to tell its audience about the rainforest, but allow them to hear and feel it, too.
Among the many facts the pupils learned about the inhabitants, climate and the “four layers” of life, the most important, they said, was how rainforests help the world.
It seemed to convince the listeners, who returned with nearly $740 in donations. At $50 per acre, the class had enough to preserve 14 acres of Amazon rainforest from clearcutting through earthsbirthday.org.
“Only 6 percent of the world’s rainforests are left,” fourth-grader Kari Jacobson said.
Chocolate, vanilla and one-fourth of our medicine comes from the rainforests, pupil Paige Miller said.
“We wouldn’t be able to survive” without them, she said.
While this was an eight-week science unit, Stevens said, it also overlapped into art (Karen Rushton’s class) and writing (Karen Kerper’s class) as well.
After studying the subject, the class had to write reports on what they discovered. They soon found that some rainforest animals are so rare that finding information on them can be difficult, even with the Internet.
“We wrote paragraphs every day,” Sydney Lamont said.
Then each class member chose an animal to design for art class. The fourth-graders covered a wall with snakes, a sloth, a gorilla, a jaguar, a woolly monkey, poison dart frogs, a toucan, an ocelot and a quetzal (a bird that looks like a cross between a parakeet and a parrot).
They couldn’t make everything to scale. Those four layers of life reach 180 feet in the air, pupil Abby Knoop said: the “floor” is where most four-legged animals live; the “understudy” is bushes and little trees that reach up to 60 feet high; the “canopy” is larger trees from 60 to 130 feet; and the “emergent layer” is where birds fly, up to 130 feet above ground.
Lamont noted that most Iowa trees would fall within the “understudy” layer.
“The whole point of this ... was that they are cutting down trees,” which need to be preserved, Lamont said.
And when, exactly, is Earth’s birthday?
“It’s every day,” Lamont said.
A gentle mist came out of the water bottle and sprayed on the second-grader’s head.
Science teacher Wendy Stevens’ class wanted not only to tell its audience about the rainforest, but allow them to hear and feel it, too.
Among the many facts the pupils learned about the inhabitants, climate and the “four layers” of life, the most important, they said, was how rainforests help the world.
It seemed to convince the listeners, who returned with nearly $740 in donations. At $50 per acre, the class had enough to preserve 14 acres of Amazon rainforest from clearcutting through earthsbirthday.org.
“Only 6 percent of the world’s rainforests are left,” fourth-grader Kari Jacobson said.
Chocolate, vanilla and one-fourth of our medicine comes from the rainforests, pupil Paige Miller said.
“We wouldn’t be able to survive” without them, she said.
While this was an eight-week science unit, Stevens said, it also overlapped into art (Karen Rushton’s class) and writing (Karen Kerper’s class) as well.
After studying the subject, the class had to write reports on what they discovered. They soon found that some rainforest animals are so rare that finding information on them can be difficult, even with the Internet.
“We wrote paragraphs every day,” Sydney Lamont said.
Then each class member chose an animal to design for art class. The fourth-graders covered a wall with snakes, a sloth, a gorilla, a jaguar, a woolly monkey, poison dart frogs, a toucan, an ocelot and a quetzal (a bird that looks like a cross between a parakeet and a parrot).
They couldn’t make everything to scale. Those four layers of life reach 180 feet in the air, pupil Abby Knoop said: the “floor” is where most four-legged animals live; the “understudy” is bushes and little trees that reach up to 60 feet high; the “canopy” is larger trees from 60 to 130 feet; and the “emergent layer” is where birds fly, up to 130 feet above ground.
Lamont noted that most Iowa trees would fall within the “understudy” layer.
“The whole point of this ... was that they are cutting down trees,” which need to be preserved, Lamont said.
And when, exactly, is Earth’s birthday?
“It’s every day,” Lamont said.