Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Sea Lover: Donna Dean, a fourth-grade teacher at Willow Glen Elementary School, stands in front of one of the murals her students and students in third-grade teacher Ann Horton's class created as a 'thank you' to those who helped them find transportation so they could attend a field trip to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz.
Students' efforts take them to the beach to meet marine scientists
Field trip to Seymour Laboratory a big hit with teachers, too
By Kate Carter
By working together and sharing enthusiasm, students at Willow Glen Elementary School touched sea anemones, saw sea otters in action and learned from real scientists.
Fourth-grade teacher Donna Dean, third-grade teacher Ann Horton, science teacher Bill Kumagai and two parents chaperoned about 50 students to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz Dec. 19. Without their efforts and help from the community, though, the children wouldn't have made it there.
In early October, Dean found out her class would receive the rare chance to visit the laboratory and experience one of its popular youth educational programs. However, she soon discovered that she and her students would have to come up with some way to pay for transportation to arrive at the lab by 8:30 a.m., as the San Jose Unified School District's buses are all in use at that time.
The energetic teacher isn't one to take no for an answer, and she contacted anyone and everyone she could to help raise the fee of approximately $650, or reduce that amount, needed to get her students to share her love for marine biology.
Principal Anita Sunseri pulled some strings and got an inexpensive bus chartered from the Oak Grove School District. District 6 City Councilman Ken Yeager's office chipped in $340 toward the effort. Small private donations added up to another $340 after the Willow Glen Resident published an article about the class's plight. The Parent-Teacher Association promised to make sure the students got on the bus.
And Dean and Horton enlisted their own students in the effort, which Dean says has brought a new level of cohesiveness and leadership to her classroom.
"The class has really pulled together because it worked for this," she says. "And it really got a sense of marine biology. That's a field of science you don't get much in basic education."
The youth and some of their parents coordinated two popcorn sales--a bag of popcorn for 25 cents and hot sauce for an additional 10 cents--that raised about $100 toward the trip. Then the students counted all the money in class and subtracted the cost of the popcorn and sauce.
"Everybody got involved," Dean says. "They really got a good business lesson out of it."
Photograph courtesy of Virginia Gonzales
Giant Bones: Students in Willow Glen Elementary School fourth-grade teacher Donna Dean's class examine a real skeleton of a whale during their field trip to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz Dec. 19. The trip was made possible with community support.
All that effort made the students appreciate the trip even more, as did Dean's infectious enthusiasm for her work as a docent at the marine laboratory and of marine biology in general--her classroom computer monitor displays a current view of the elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park and is updated every 10 minutes.
"The kids, they were just mesmerized," she says of the trip. "Every other Monday I talk about what I do down there, and they got to see it."
Dean says all the students arrived on time at 7:15 a.m. Dec. 19, an early hour even for their parents and teachers. None of them made any requests for bathroom breaks from the time they got on the bus until their first mid-morning snack time, an almost unheard-of feat for fidgety 8- and 9-year-olds, Dean says. Some students were so excited about the trip, she says, that they forgot to eat their lunches.
"Nobody complained," she says. "They had a ball. They got more science from that field trip than they're ever going to get in a year."
The children split up into groups; one studied otters and the environmental impacts of human activity with marine biologists in the lab while others went to Natural Bridges State Beach to see monarch butterflies and otters in their natural habitat. After lunch, they switched.
Dean's group poked around at a sea lion carcass on the beach. Fourth-grader Nina Jackson, 9, says she didn't like that part too much, but she liked seeing the sea otters and learning how they hunt for food, like decorator crabs, hermit crabs and snails.
The center displays a real blue-whale skeleton, and the children learned interesting facts like how much urine a blue-whale bladder holds--five and half gallons--and that its brain weighs less than its tongue.
"I really did like the whale skeleton," says fourth-grader Derek Vandonzel, 9. "It was cool."
Jackson adds that, even though blue whales are larger than killer whales, she likes killer whales better.
Vandonzel also says that the trip was worth the early wake-up call.
Photograph courtesy of Virginia Gonzales
Curious Minds: (From left) Kevin McCormick, 9, Carlos Cuellar, 9, Aldric Torres, 9, Aeriana Espinoza, 9, Daniel Garcia, 10, and Josh Betencourt, 9; all students in Willow Glen Elementary School fourth-grade teacher Donna Dean's class, checked out tidepool life during their field trip to Seymour Marine Discovery Center at the Long Marine Laboratory near Santa Cruz.
"The hardest part was getting up really early to get to school at 7 in the morning," he says.
The students also touched some sea creatures in the center's touch tanks--sea anemones, jingle shells, sea urchins and others. They saw aquariums of jellyfish and sunflower starfish, which Jackson says she preferred to the touch tanks, and watched an octopus pop the lid off a closed milk jug to reach food hidden inside.
They even met the center's head aquarist, Peter Macht, who answered a student who wanted to know if scallops sleep.
"They could physically talk with real scientists and learned they're not stodgy," Dean says. "[The students'] questions were treated with respect. There's a true joy in what [marine biologists] do that I haven't seen in other fields. The kids picked up on it. They were very much impressed with that field of science."
Jackson agrees.
"I thought it was pretty cool that [the scientists] show kids how they learn stuff," she says.
The school raised about $125 more than it needed to go to the lab, which will go into a PTA teacher field trip fund, says PTA president Karen Potts. She and Horton have plans to take their students to the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View next month.
"I don't believe in giving them easy stuff," Dean says. "I want to push them as far and show them as much as possible."
She says she will start incorporating what the class experienced at the lab into the class' curriculum this month, as well as sending out a mass of thank-you notes to the donors. She says she and her students have a lot to be grateful for; her only wish is that she could take more children to learn what science is all about.
"They could actually see what was under the water," Dean says. "It was truly hands-on, and that's how it should be. I want to go again."
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
