By Julie Rasicot
Special to the Washington Post
Thursday, September 28, 2006
The small black chrysalis with its tiny band of bright gold dots hanging from a silken thread was the center of attention in teacher Cathy Carpenter's class at the Barrie School in Silver Spring.
Students, as well as a small video recorder perched on a stepladder, were keeping a close watch on the chrysalis suspended inside a clear plastic hanging pouch, waiting to see when the monarch butterfly inside would emerge.
As fifth-grader Luke Murray checked on the chrysalis, through which part of the butterfly's orange-and-black wing was visible, he explained what would happen once the butterfly broke through.
"The butterfly is all crippled and all that, and then it starts sunning its wings so it can warm up its wings and not be crippled any more," he said.
Next, the butterfly would be placed inside a "butterfly condo," a small white tabletop tent, so its wings can finish drying. "If I was a butterfly, I'd like to live there. It's like a big mansion," Luke said.
In the class that Carpenter teaches with Judy Yormick, butterflies rule the fall semester. From a tiny caterpillar through its metamorphosis into an elegant butterfly, the monarch is the subject of lessons ranging from biology to geography in the combined fourth- and fifth-grade class at the private school.
"Every day I come into the classroom, I go straight to see if a new chrysalis or caterpillar has come out," said fourth-grader Jessica Lauman-Lairson, 9.
For the second consecutive year, the class is raising and releasing monarchs for the butterflies' annual fall migration to Mexico for the winter. The project, which includes tagging the butterflies with identification numbers, is part of a national conservation project sponsored by Monarch Watch, an educational outreach program based at the University of Kansas.
School officials say that participating in the monarch conservancy program is a perfect fit for Barrie's Montesorri curriculum, which focuses on a multi-sensory, student-centered approach to education.
"We saw an opportunity here for our program to effectively exercise several of its fundamental principles," said Tim Trautman, head of the school. "If you step back a little bit, what is going on here is a nice, tidy package of the many important dimensions that we value in education."
Animal Planet, a subsidiary of the Discovery Channel, saw an opportunity in the class project. A television crew from the cable channel recently spent the day filming the class for a six-episode series featuring schools across the nation committed to conservation efforts. "Spring Watch USA" is scheduled to air in April.
While the video camera monitored the black chrysalis, Carpenter and the students reenacted the life cycle of the butterfly for the TV crew, from the staged arrival of tiny caterpillars from Monarch Watch to the release of several adults ordered for the filming.
In reality, the butterfly project began the first day of school and will conclude in October. Since students began classes, they have been monitoring and caring for the creatures, which grew quickly as caterpillars before they began forming chrysalises.
"What I find is that it really gives a kind of unifying aspect to the classroom as the class starts in the fall," Yormick said. "Having a project where you're working in nature really is kind of settling. It's high interest for kids. It's very empowering to garner this knowledge and become experts on monarchs."
In addition to studying the butterfly's life cycle, the students have been learning about geography while tracking the annual migration and environmental issues, such as the destructive impact of development on monarch habitats across the country and in Mexico. Eastern monarchs fly to forests in the Mexican mountains; western butterflies head to the California coast for the winter.
"One thing impacts another," Carpenter said. "All these lessons we want to teach children are available to us through the lessons of the monarch."
The students soon will make paper monarchs to mail to Mexican schoolchildren as part of a symbolic migration sponsored by Journey North, a program that engages students in a global study of wildlife migration. The Mexican children will reciprocate in the spring, when the real monarchs would make their journey north.
"By participating in projects like Journey North, we can say to children in Mexico that we care about the monarch butterfly," Carpenter said.
Outside the classroom windows, the school is growing a garden full of plants favored by butterflies. Before the monarchs are released into the garden for their flight to Mexico, the students will use toothpicks to carefully place tiny white stickers bearing identification numbers on one wing of each butterfly.
The class's record of the tags and release date will help Monarch Watch monitor the butterflies' migration, should any of the school's tagged insects be spotted in Mexico, Carpenter said.
The students say they hope some of their creatures survive the long trip, during which monarchs travel as many as 50 miles a day riding thermal air currents.
"The only thing that could possibly happen is they could fly too high and hit a plane," said fourth-grader Karrin Thompson, 10.
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