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Year 1999-2000
Hooker Middle School
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Grade 6: Katherine Scully
Ms. Scully’s unit, “Oysters in Long Island Sound,” focuses on the diversity of life in this local habitat. One of her stated goals was that students would “become advocates for keeping their environment healthy.”
 “I could have collected some of the shells, but not all of them. And the birds and the other types of specimens that teachers can’t get. For the children to have that opportunity was fascinating… because the birds were so fascinating. We see the birds outside all the time, but we don't see them here right holding onto them, and that’s what was so fascinating… . Though we do a lot of hands on… in 6th grade they need to start using science books, the skills of pulling information out… . I was really impressed the way they used the books from the lab. Students who are not the best readers were getting books and finding their specimens by picture… . They were finding their creature and then trying to identify information about it, which I found fascinating. … Some went from book to book, they kept going for more information. It was wonderful… . If they couldn’t find it, ‘this is all it says about my animal, I can’t find everything I want,’ then they could ask people… . They enjoyed this so much, and it was a good way to show them that research could be fun. It was towards the end of the third week that I told them that those entries would be turned into a paper—but I told them, you’ve done a lot; they’d done the hard part. They of course loved doing it—they usually cringe when they have to do a paper.”
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Library Media Specialist: Beth Hart
In the second year of the program, library media specialists like Ms. Hart were not required to write a curriculum unit, but served as resources for Peabody Fellows at the school.
“I had kids running up from the BioAction Lab if they couldn’t find what they were looking for. ‘Do you have anything on…?’ And I usually did. So I felt pretty pleased…going after the solution. They came running up so enthusiastically: ‘I need to know this!’… It’s so much more than looking up and filling in the blanks about the animal.”
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