The Center for Teaching and Learning recently welcomed Chewonki’s Traveling Natural History Program and their “Fins and Flippers” program. The students learned about the three major groups of marine mammals and their adaptations. The instructor and students discussed what a mammal was, and then how marine mammals adapted to their environments with adaptations for breathing, eating, and locomotion. Younger students viewed a pilot whale skeleton, touched seal fur, and played a fun matching game to identify whales by their tails. Older students worked to reconstruct a sixteen-foot pilot whale skeleton, learning about the different types of bones and how they function in the whale’s body. They tried to piece together the 15-foot partial skeleton, with three groups working on different sections of the whale’s spine. Once the completed skeletal puzzle was added to the frame, our instructor added the skeletal fins, skull, and ribcage. Older students examined baleen, seal fur, and various whale teeth too. Thank you to Chewonki for sharing your terrific program with CTL! 

Each year CTL’s history and science curricula, Pre-K–8, revolves around paired concepts. Students engage as researchers of the paired concepts across a year, learning in-depth and collaboratively about the natural and physical worlds and how history is shaped by the circumstances and choices of individuals and nations. Through this five-year spiral approach to the content areas, students encounter an introduction to ancient cultures, a chronology of American history, and a balance of natural and physical sciences. Concepts addressed during their first years at CTL are revisited at greater depth in students’ final years. CTL’s science curriculum this year is Water: Fresh and Salt. We are lucky to live in an area with so many wonderful learning opportunities and field experiences for this curriculum.

To learn more about CTL, please visit our website at www.c-t-l.org, or contact CTL’s Head of School, Katy Inman, at katy@c-t-l.org.