Planting seeds and stuffing mice
By Nathan Straus News Reporter

Nathan Straus Photo Fifth grader Jawad Muhammad inspects the mouse as his group is told how to stuff animals.

The Chandler Intermediate School science club met for its monthly get-together February 21. At this particular meeting the club ran through a series of three stations designed to help the children learn more about the environment.

The activities started at 3:30 pm as the students were split into three groups by grade and set to fulfill a task.

In the CIS cafeteria the students got a lesson in agriculture from Brownsboro High School's agriculture department. Students from the high school even visited CIS to help the children plant seeds.

Kids would take a clear, plastic cup and fill it with soil. After packing the soil down they planted either cosmos seeds or zinnias seeds into the cup and sprinkled a little more soil over it.

With the seed ready, all the students had left was to water the seed and wait for it to grow.

Station two, located in the gym, saw a scene of green paper with several little items on it. Students arriving for this activity were told the paper was a lily pad and the children were supposed to sit around the paper like frogs.

Nathan Straus Photo CIS Science Club students pose for a quick picture before heading to their next station.

Kristin Cotten, the CIS teacher in charge of the frog station, said the frog students would have to don blindfolds before the exercise began. The exercise entailed the frogs catching flies, pieces of paper with Velcro glued on, with their tongues. The frog tongues took the form of the party toys that make noises and uncurl a paper tube when blown on.

"We're trying to show them animals are affected by different factors in their environment, " Cotten said.

Many blind frogs didn't manage to catch a great deal of flies, even with the other students trying to direct the frogs' aim.

Once this exercise was over, the students took the blindfolds off and tried again. This time most of the flies were caught in seconds.

The station's activities ended with one blindfolded frog and one non-blindfolded frog from each team. The vision capable frogs did better than the blinded ones.

The final activity drew gasps from students as they saw what they were about to do.

Station three featured the "big activity of the day": taxidermy.

Students were given frozen mice so they would learn how to stuff them.

Angela Peyton, fifth grade science teacher at CIS, said the taxidermy exercise wasn't a planned part of the monthly meeting, but an activity thought up only a few weeks ago.

The kids went through the steps of stuffing their own mice, though finishing in the time allowed was difficult.

After all three grade levels had gone through the stations the science club meeting was over. However, the students still have next month to look forward to.