Featured Educators
Echo Horizon School
5 Years of PigeonWatch Participation!
Five years ago Echo Horizon School, in Culver City, California, began to participate in Project PigeonWatch. PigeonWatch became an integral part of the second grade science curriculum.
Throughout the last five years, teachers Anita Melnick and Roz Henderson have created a wonderful partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They have used PigeonWatch to involve families in their children's science education, and have found creative solutions to difficult problems (at first they couldn't find ANY pigeons).
This year Echo Horizon school even submitted their data through our online data entry system. Parent volunteers worked carefully with Urban Bird Studies to find the best way to enter all the data collected by the students and their families!
Urban Bird Studies staff continues to learn all about the difficulties and rewards of involving classrooms in meaninful citizen science participation through our partnership with Echo Horizon School.
Thank you Echo Horizon School teachers and students !
Anita Melnick , second grade teacher, writes,
"The two second grade classes at Echo Horizon School
in Culver City, California have been Pigeon Watching for the last 5 years.
This wonderful study, conducted by scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
provides the opportunity for our students and their families to become citizen
scientists. This project enhances the children's observation and recording
skills and fully involves them in a research project conducted by Cornell
University. To embark on this adventure the children view a video, prepared
by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, that enables them to full understand this
project. The students then ask questions and discuss how they will go about
completing their assignment. After the movie and discussion the children participate
in a simulated pigeon watch, using signs with the names of the many pigeons
they hope to observe. A letter is sent home to their parents to insure that
they understand this important project. It is explained that Pigeon Watching
can be done on the weekends as a family activity or with others in the class
as a group project. Observations may take place one time or several times.
The first step of this project is to find pigeons! A number of places around
our city are suggested as good places to find pigeon sites. The children are
all given tally sheets, prepared by Cornell, to record the number and types
of pigeons they observe. They are given small posters with the different colors
pictured to facilitate easy identification. After the tally sheets come back
to school the data is transferred to the Data forms and sent back to Cornell.
Science is an important part of the curriculum at Echo Horizon School and
our second graders love this opportunity to participate in an ongoing scientific
study. When they return to school with their completed tally sheets you can
feel their excitement and enthusiasm. It is delightful to hear how they creatively
solved the problems of where to find flocks of pigeons, how they lured them
down from buildings with bread crumbs and how they figured out if a particular
pigeon was a blue-bar or a pied!"
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