It's time for one last entry about the Bear Expert Team! This entry will explain some of the work we did between the last entry and the final share for friends and family that took place the Friday before break. Thank you to all the friends and families that came and for those of you who could not make it, I have included some pictures. Thanks to Georga, Jeanine, Renee, Angie, Nellie, Robyn, Shifra, and Bradley for your help and support! (:
Our Trip to the Woods
The next day, we began preparations by packing our backpacks. All of the students participated in creating a very thorough checklist for what we should bring. Students listed camping equipment: tents, sleeping bags, ropes, food, water, pillows. They also remembered all of the bear studying equipment we would need: cameras, video cameras, binoculars, telescopes, notebooks, pens, walkie talkies (to keep us together). We also decided on guidelines we should follow in the woods: --no one should ever be alone, --we shouldn't pick any flowers or plants (so others can enjoy them and because "plants have feelings too") --stay far away from the bears and try not to scare them. I decided that someone should stay behind to take care of the office and answer phone calls, so after some protestations from the students I agreed to stay behind. I told them they were Bear Experts and they had each other to depend on......they would be fine! Soon after, I went into role as a young person decked out in a backpack, hiking hat and headlamp who knocked tentatively on the office door. I asked if I could be an expert-in training and go along into the field with them. They agreed but only after telling me the forest rules and getting me to agree. I had had fun laying down tracks
(laminated, cut-out animal tracks) that morning before school. So, when we got to the "woods" we followed the tracks to find different pictures of animals.
After a chaotic and fun activity of following and identifying animal tracks, we came back to the circle on the rug to gather around the "campfire". Soon the students were roasting marshmallows (without prompting from me) and singing songs! As the Expert in Training, I acted scared about sleeping out in the woods in the dark and they told me to be brave and sang me lullabies so I would not be so scared.
The next several sessions took place in the woods. We watched videos of black bears, looked at pictures, and talked about black bear behavior. One of the sessions focused on bear "emotions". We looked at pictures of angry bears and talked about how bears "bluster" (huff and puff and snort and clack their teeth) when they are scared or threatened to scare away potential threats. I went into role as a hiker who was terrified of a bear that was blustering. The Bear Experts convinced the hiker that everything was okay, that the bear was just faking it and was more scared of me than I was scared of it. In Georga's class, J. said, "Some bears might attack you but the bear you saw was a black bear and they don't attack humans!" Moments like these, when students are explaining their understanding to characters, are great opportunities for assessing student comprehension.
We also spent a day in role as bears, acting out bear behavior/activities in all the four seasons. I sang them through summer and fall, then when snow started to fall, I gave them their coats (their winter bear skin) and then found places in the room to build their dens: by digging them out of the ground, finding a cave, or finding an empty tree trunk. They "hibernated" through the winter (to a long, meditative song) and then awoke in spring to a dance party!
After several days exploring bear behavior in the woods, the Bear Experts encountered a problem! They ran into a logger who had cut down a tree only to find that it was hollow and that three baby bears were inside. The Bear Experts deduced that the mother had heard the sound of the saw and had run away in fear. The logger had been waiting all night in the cold for the mother to return. At this point we had a very serious discussion about what to do. We discussed that at this point in their lives they could not find food on their own, but were dependent upon their mother's milk. Some students wanted to go try to find the mother by tracking pawprints. Others were concerned about having to split up the group. Since the mother had not returned by this point, some students conjectured that she may have died or may not be coming back at all. In both classes students said, "we need to be the mother for the cubs". The over-all consensus was that we should take the cubs back to the office and feed them until we decided what to do. A convention that worked nicely throughout our time "in the woods" was "calling" Kelli back at the office since I was now playing the young Expert in Training. Again, it was a great way to have students recap what had happened within the context of the drama, instead of having to ask, "So, what happened today?" The students would pick up a block and pretend to dial and pretend to talk to me back at the office.
When we returned, we talked about what the cubs needed. We decided that we would need to recreate what their den might have been like. A group of students got to work in the block area, making a "den". Others gathered soft things from the classroom, stuffed animals, cloth, blankets to put inside. Others started warming up milk in the kitchen and feeding the tiny bears with baby bottles. In Georga's class, a student who carried a teddy bear with her at all times in the classroom offered to give it up to put in the den so it could mimic the mother's fur. I thought this was very generous, as the teddy bear was very important to her and I hadn't seen her without it for several days. All throughout this process we looked at pictures of real infant cubs and discussed what their lives were like in the very beginning. I set an alarm and we fed them every 5 minutes.
After taking care of the baby bears it was time to decide what to do. We talked about the importance of returning them to their natural habitat. While it was necessary to take care of them now, we could not teach them how to be bears...only another bear could do that. In Georga's class, N brought up an idea that we could give the baby bears to the three mother bears we had observed and seen in the woods (the students had named them Yoony, Jewel, and Toughie). When I mentioned that the mother's woudl still be hibernating, S had the idea that we should sneak up very quietly to the dens and deposit the baby bears inside next to the mothers. In fact, this very solution that the students came up with was the same solution used by The Appalachian Bear Rescue organization to rehabilitate 3 bears they found in the woods. Here is the story that I borrowed from for our drama:
www.appalachianbearrescue.org/bearly_alive.html
The Final Performance
On the final day of our Bear study, we invited friends and family to join us. Shifra brought in real black bear bones and a black bear pelt for us to look at! The students were thrilled to have real bones in our "bone room". For the performance I explained that the audience would join our drama as journalists at the first ever Bear Expert Team press conference. I handed parents questions to ask and we began the conference. Here were some of the questions: "I heard that you all sing a chant that explains who you are. Could you sing it for us?" "What do bears do in each season?", "I can see pictures you have of bears that look very angry! Why are they so angry?" "How did you find the bears in the woods?" Each question gave us a chance to sing a song or explain something we had discovered in our study. After the questions were asked, we "walked into the woods" all together, searched for the mother's dens and sang a quiet lullaby as the students ceremoniously passed the bears down a line and placed them carefully in the mother's den. I narrated that 2 years later the BET decided to go out into the woods and check in on how their bears were doing. I then showed the students and audience pictures of young cubs with their mothers and the students speculated on how they were doing now. To end the performance, I awarded each Bear Expert Team member with a special gift, a CD of the songs we had created during our study. We applauded each member as I shook their hand. A success!
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