Community Partners: Hoboken Museum and Wallace Primary School 

Pictured here is Kathleen Temple, 5^th Grade  teacher at the Wallace Primary School in Hoboken, N.J. (right), recipient of the mini grant for Celebrate Urban Birds, with Bob Foster, director of the Hoboken Historical Museum and Carol Shields, Curriculum and Professional Development Specialist, Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology.

"Come Fly With Me: Urban Birds of Hoboken"
Exhibit Opens on Oct. 19, with Artists Studio Tour

    On Sunday, Oct. 19, from 12 – 3 p.m., stop by the Hoboken Historical Museum, 1301 Hudson St., during the Artists Studio Tour to meet teacher Kathy Temple and some of the Wallace School fifth-graders whose artwork and poems will go on display in the new Upper Gallery exhibit, "Come Fly with Me: Urban Birds of Hoboken." Admission is free.
    The colorful artwork resulted from a creative, cross-curriculum project developed by Temple, a 36-year veteran Hoboken teacher, using a grant from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and materials provided by its "Celebrate Urban Birds" program  (www.celebrateurbanbirds.org). For the past five or six years, she has been spicing up her classes by participating in Cornell's "Pigeon Watch," a national initiative to count and track the species. She would take her classes to a local park and teach them how to conduct scientific tallies and report their data to Cornell.
    Always looking for new ways to engage her students through multifaceted learning activities, she learned about Cornell's "Celebrate Urban Birds" grant, applied online and won. Cornell supplied posters of bird illustrations and suggested some activities and resources. Temple used the grant money to supplement these with a wide variety of books on birds, a device that plays different bird songs and art materials to make "peace doves," mounted on large dowels, like the ones that naturalist Jane Goodall designed to raise awareness of conservation and world peace. Her 2008 fifth graders kicked off the project with original art (no tracing!) and poetry about different bird species they see in Hoboken, including sparrows, finches, blackbirds, swallows, mourning doves, and, of course, pigeons.
   "I like to get the children involved in several different learning processes," says Temple. "It gets them excited about learning if they can use language arts, art, music, math, research on the computer – that's the goal." They also benefit from the guidance of professor Carol Shields, Curriculum and Professional Development Specialist at the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology, as part of a partnership between Stevens and the Hoboken schools.

Master teacher Kathleen Temple writes to keep us updated on progress of the project,"P.S. I'm busy working on an I pod of various songs that have bird or fly in the title.It will be played at the museum. The children will also produce a powerpoint presentation that will play as well. Poems, drawings, bird sayings and jokes. We are multi-media." 

   For her creativity, Ms. Temple was featured in the March 2008 Connect, a magazine highlighting innovative programs by teachers of K-8. Her program was also highlighted on Cornell's website, which mentioned the Museum exhibit. The exhibit will be on display through November 9, 2008.

The collaboration has been announced on the Hoboken Board of Education's website: http://www.hoboken.k12.nj.us/

Click on "Wallace Primary School" and then click on "A Reason to Celebrate"