Welcome to winter! Southern
hemisphere winter, that is. June 1 (last Friday) was the first day of winter
here. It’s starting to feel like it too. While it won’t get nearly as cold as
it does back home in Ohio
(and no snow here either, what a bummer), I almost feel colder here. I think
it’s because Australian buildings tend to have less insulation and lots of
places don’t have central heating. That means you’re left bundling up in five
layers just to stay warm in your own home. Chris and I have a space heater in
our room, but it doesn’t keep the kitchen/dining area warm, especially since
one of the windows has a broken pane of glass and it lets drafts in. Burrr.
Also, I didn’t bring any of my warm winter coats here, or my boots, so I feel
less prepared clothes-wise for the chilliness. It’s also been quite rainy and
dreary here the past few weeks, which I don’t like. If it’s going to be cold,
I’d rather it be cold and snowy than cold and wet (aka miserable).
Anyway, it’s (again) been a
busy past few weeks. Two weeks ago I gave bat presentations to six classes at
one of the local primary schools. The classes ranged from Receptions
(kindergarten) through Year 6. For the older kids I gave my “standard” bat
presentation on PowerPoint that included some bat myths (like bats are blind
(ALL bats can see) or that all bats suck blood (only 3 of about 1,200 species
in the world are vampire bats and eat blood)), cool bat facts (like the largest
bat has a wingspan of six feet, the smallest bat (the Bumblebee Bat) weighs
less than a penny, or that some bats can eat up to their body weight in insects
in one night), and pictures of some weird bats. We then made the brown paper
bag bat puppets that I first took down to the school kids in Texas. I had a bit of trouble finding the
materials for them, as brown paper lunch bags are shaped differently here in Australia. They
were missing the flap at the bottom like lunch bags in the US have. That
made it a bit more difficult to prepare, as the flap served as the head of the
bat. I had to improvise and finally figured out a way to fold the bags to make
them work. I was a bit worried that the Year 6 students might be a little old
(aka “too cool”) for making puppets, but they all got excited when I showed
what we were making, and by the end of the day the new students filing into the
classroom would excitedly ask if they were making bat puppets. Several of the
teachers asked for the puppet design afterwards and said they wanted to make
them with their other classes. So I guess they were a big hit!
Bat Girl talks about bats! Wearing my
bat hat generously gifted to me by Jed Burtt, North American bats t-shirt, and
bat cape.
One of the paper bag bat puppets. Who
WOULDN’T want one?
With the students making bat puppets.
For the younger kids I
tweaked the PowerPoint presentation a bit to make it more basic. They still
LOVED the pictures of weird bats. Chris, my lovely assistant, and I did a
demonstration of echolocation by clapping our hands Marco-Polo style until I
(the bat) found him (the insect) in his hiding spot. The kids really got a kick
out of that too. It was great because most of the teachers had had a lesson on
bats before I came (including reading the book Stellaluna and explaining
the differences between microbats and megabats), so many of the students could
answer the questions I brought up. I think a lesson on bats should be part of
every classroom. After the presentation and echolocation demonstration, we made
our own “bat habitats” by drawing trees, caves, lakes/streams, and bats on
paper. It was really funny because Chris drew his bat habitat up on the
classroom whiteboard so the kids could see what to do, and instead of drawing a
very simple bat to get the idea across, he drew a fairly anatomically correct
bat. This left some of the kids, one boy in particular, taking the entire time
trying to draw the bat EXACTLY HOW CHRIS DREW IT. It’s amazing how simple you
have to make things for young kids. At least that boy went away with a very
good drawing of a bat!
Each class was 30 minutes
long, and we were there from 9:00am to 3:00pm (with several breaks in between
classes). Despite the small breaks, it was EXHAUSTING to be on my feet and
talking for that long! I really have to take my hat off to teachers who do it
every day. Kudos to them!
My lovely assistant, Chris, working on his bat habitat masterpiece, bent on confusing the kids.
No comments:
Post a Comment