Bat presentation and Boxes

This Spring, one assignment we had for student teaching was to conduct a community based unit of instruction. After thinking carefully about what I wanted to do, and discussing it with my cooperating teachers, I decided to use my mammals unit for this assignment. One major issue that Pennsylvania has been facing is white nose syndrome, do I decided to work bats into my community based unit.

5 participants showing off their bat boxes

This unit ended up having 5 steps to being successful. The first step was teaching the students bats and other mammal identification through in class instruction. Second, I brought a guest speaker from the elk center in to the class to talk to the students about deer and elk biology. Third I had the students researching and preparing a presentation about several different topics relating to bats and habitat management. Fourth I took 5 student volunteer to assist me in conducting a bat and habitat improvement workshop for the community. and finally, in the workshop we build several bat boxes, for the most part the participants got to take home their own bat box, but the remaining boxes are going to be donated to different community members and hung up by the stream below the school. 

Mr. Clark using a screw to score the inside baffles 

Overall, each step ended up being extremely important in order to move on with the plan, and the students took a lot of information from this unit (One student even used the bat information in an extemporaneous speech!).
Overall the workshop went extremely well and the unit couldn't have gone better.