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Giraffes and Bats: A Giraffe Field Report
Neil Brier, who teaches eighth-grade Life Skills classes at Cardigan Mountain School in Canaan, NH, has been using the Giraffe Heroes Program for several years. Brier has noted a definite increase in caring: in several instances class members have stood up for kids who were being taunted, and participation in the community service club has grown.
Brier reports that Stage I, Hear the Story, has been a revelation to his students, "opening their eyes" to the difference between celebrities, such as Dennis Rodman, and real heroes such as George Hankins.
Brier uses Every Day Heroes, a paperback of 260 very short Giraffe profiles, with his slow readers and has them report on their favorite 10 Giraffes. The content has heightened these students' interest in reading.
In Stage II, Tell the Story, Brier has kids look for heroes in Cardigan County, and reports a three-way split on results: a third of the stories are wonderful, a third are OK, and a third are dubious on the hero meter.
The students invite the Giraffes they've discovered to school assemblies, where they are presented with certificates. The process, Brier reports, makes the students "much more aware of what people are doing in the community."
In Stage III, Become the Story, his students have worked on theft prevention, buying rainforest acreage, recycling, fundraising for Save the Children, literacy, and assisting the homeless. They choose their projects by using the Program lessons that go from brainstorming to a democratic selection process; the Gimme Five lesson is also used. The most unusual project they've chosen to do involves bats.
The kids got interested in bats when an old school nearby was converted into an inn. The largest bat population in New England was living in the building's attic. To head off the possible execution of the bats, the kids decided to educate the community on how cool bats are. They did presentations throughout the community, explaining the bat's role in the ecosystem (one bat eats 2,000 mosquitos every night and bat guano is excellent fertilizer). The kids discovered that one of the school's maintenance workers was a bat hobbyist who was eager to teach them how to make and place bat houses; the wood shop teacher helped the kids build them. The students enlisted the cooperation of the inn's owners and were allowed to make and place bat houses around the inn building. Instead of being killed, the bats moved from the attic to attractive new housing.
This could be a first-- kids learning to be Giraffes by helping bats.
To learn more about Giraffes and the Giraffe Program, visit The Giraffe Project website. The Giraffe Program is a K-12 curriculum that teaches kids about real heroes and gets them going on lives of courage, caring and responsibility, and the Giraffe Partners Trunk--everything a business or club needs to help a classroom full of kids to stand tall.
Copyright © 1999 The Giraffe Project, all rights reserved.
Please contact The Giraffe Project for permission to reprint or distribute.Posted with permission by New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.org
E-mail: info@newhorizons.org