The Rookery

Several students have been working hard to convince me that having a turtle tank in the room is a great idea.  A few weeks ago, I agreed to the plan and a small committee went to work fundraising and doing research.  Now that we are almost ready for the turtles to arrive, I knew it was time to bring the rest of the class into the action.

Part of what persuaded me to get the tank was the realization that the turtles would provide an authentic opportunity for us to learn about ecosystems and study an organism carefully.  But even as I planned today's initial lesson, I worried.  There is a lot of content in life sciences that I want to make sure they understand…if I let the study be guided by the Herons, would we be able to go deep enough?  (You know where the next paragraph is going — but isn't it funny that I still worry about these things, even after years of practice teaching progressively?)

In just ten minutes, these are the questions posed by the Herons after I simply asked, "What do we need to find out to keep these turtles alive?":

• What temperature does it need?
• Does it always need the same temperature?
• What does it eat?
• How much does it eat?
• What does it need for swimming and sitting?
• It's amphibious but does that make it an amphibian?
• It's a reptile…but what makes something a reptile?
• How do you tell if it's male or female?
• How does it make its shell?
• What's the geometry of the shell?
• How do you tell a turtle's age by its shell?
• What is the shell made of?
• What are predators to the turtle?
• What makes them sick?

There were more questions but you can see that I need not have worried.  Already we have the groundwork laid for data collection, food webbing, habitats, life cycles, nomenclature, tesselation (shell geometry), and adaptations.  And that's all without a turtle in the classroom.