INFORMATION ABOUT THE PRESENTATIONS!
- Our talks are free to interested classes!
- Our talks are available to 2nd graders through High School classes and Adult groups.
- All presenters have incorporated NGSS into their presentations and often have worksheets or other materials that enhance NGSS after the presenter leaves. If there are topics which are of special interest or importance to your class, please let us know and communicate with the speaker ahead of time. We will do our best to accommodate your classes needs.
- We are happy to participate in science oriented after school programs where the students are engaged and accompanied by adults, such as the excellent Northern Lights Learning Center or the Saturday Math & Science Academy, but will not be available for after school programs that are less interested in content than baby sitting. All after school programs will be scheduled only after directors approval.
- We are happy to schedule Skype or Zoom interactions with your classes.
- Presentations are available in Fall semester only. It is hard to arrange speakers in the Spring, as my outreach class is not in session.
- We will work with you to accommodate your teaching schedule.
- Naturalist students will need to fit talks into their academic schedules. This may require some flexibility to accommodate both you and the Cornell student.
- We recommend scheduling ~35 minutes for each talk in younger grades, and up to 1-hr for older groups. You will want the time to have students experience the displays and/ or live animals.
- Smaller groups work more effectively than many classes combined. We are happy to speak sequentially to 2 or 3 classes, rather than talk to 3 classes combined for the presentations. It also saves commute times and transportation expenses to give several talks at a school at a time.
- We can send several speakers at a time. Often I have students with related presentations or you can have different presentation topics in different classes or grades. Our biggest constraint (other than busy college schedules) is that not all students have their own transportation. If you bring in several speakers to speak to different classes, it is easier for us to find one who has transportation to bring the others. Also, if you or a parent is able to pick up a speaker or return them to Cornell, it will give you and us much more flexibility in scheduling talks. Helping with transportation would be WONDERFUL!
- Try an Ecology Day at your school!! This is a model that has worked very well for Dryden 5th grade classes for many years and we are trying out at other schools. Basically, one day is set aside where ALL of the classes in a grade rotate through different presentations throughout the day. For example, if there are 7 classes in grade 5, each of those students will hear 7 different talks on one day. The talks would be as diverse as insects, bats, invasive species, mammal skulls, plant-insect interactions, frogs, and fossils. We have found that YOUR students love this special day and MY students come back completely charged up. We would be delighted to accommodate you for this sort of special Ecology day for your classes. Please start planning for this sort of event earlier in the semester with your fellow teachers and contact us early.
- With more diverse presentation topics, we have fewer people talking about each subject. We may not be able to accommodate all classes on certain subjects, but should be able to accommodate almost everyone with one or more dynamic topics.
- Finally, please keep in mind that you are in charge of class discipline while the speakers are in your classroom. We ALL know that class management is a skill which takes time to develop,, so please assist my students in class control.
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