Sophie

On being a scientist….. Scientists see things, think, check in books, measure things, work in teams,then draw and write about what they discover… In one of my first years of teaching, I was assigned a class of twenty-six first and second grade students in an urban public school. We served a diverse community in the heart of Denver. My class was a rambunctious multi-age group--with more boys than girls. Classes stayed together for two years in a British Primary model, but this continuity had been interrupted by the departure of a teacher the previous spring. Because there had been a long term substitute, the classroom culture had unraveled a bit, and the start of the year had been rocky. One evening during those first weeks of school, I found a large house spider on my basement steps, put her into a small jar, and took her to school the following morning. At our morning meeting, I showed my students the little creature, soon named “Sophie,” after a character in one of our favorite books, Sophie’s Masterpiece, by Eileen Spinelli.. We decided that the students should research what she needed to survive and what we should include in a habitat/home. The children then set to work. We built a habitat for her using a 2 liter soda container and put a rock, a small branch, and a tiny square of wet sponge for moisture inside. The habitat was placed on the corner of my desk, and was often the center of attention during our ‘Choice Times’ when students could observe, draw and write about Sophie. It became a daily ritual for the students to catch small insects at recess that would become lunch for our spider friend. Thus began a journey of learning about spiders--and so many things in the natural world--that would change my classroom forever. Sophie lived in our classroom for several weeks. During that time, she spun a beautiful and intricate web, and in it suspended an egg sac. The children checked on her daily, read about spiders, drew spiders, and wrote books about spiders. Then, as suddenly as her arrival transformed our classroom, early in November, Sophie’s life cycle ended---and she died. The children were very sad--and insisted on keeping her habitat on the corner of my desk where they often peered inside as we lined up to go to lunch or out to recess. Weeks later, as we were lining up to go home on the last day before Thanksgiving break, students--again peering inside the habitat--discovered that Sophie’s egg sac had hatched, and her home was filled with dozens of the tiniest spiderlings. Sophie’s life cycle was complete, and her magic was new again in our classroom. Since that time, seashells, petrified wood, bark beetle twigs, wishing rocks, arrowheads, caterpillars, sea lion whiskers, wishbones, lightning stones, and ammonites have enriched and enlivened the morning meeting ritual in my many classrooms.. One morning, a black widow entranced us all! Such things inspire my students to think more deeply about science and the natural world in which we live. Natural curiosity about these things is followed by the desire to know more. Later in my teaching career, a science journaling project encouraged my students to document, through word and picture, their own interests in the natural world. Their experiments constantly amazed me—especially the level of thinking that went into the observations—from noticing the upside down reflection in a spoon to finding out that a boat can carry a heavier load if floating on salt water. There was no end to the discoveries made and the excited chatter that always followed… Using my science background and my own curiosity about the natural world, I constantly use science to enrich literacy and mathematical content---and to increase student engagement, of course! It has always played a key role in planning integrated units of study and as a springboard into so many content areas in the classroom. Years after Sophie made her way into my classroom, two boys who had been in that class arrived at my door on a Sunday afternoon in October with a large garden spider in a jar. They had found her in their garden and worried that she would freeze in the snow that was forecast for later that evening. In the following months, she became another visitor to my classroom--encouraging student curiosity and investigation. Jeannine West Paull was a K-5 classroom teacher for over twenty years and now works as a District Instructional Coach in Santa Fe, NM, supporting, training, and mentoring new teachers.