BirdSleuth Caribbean Lessons 7 & 8

Birds Caribbean sent me materials written in French to lead a BirdSleuth Caribbean class for teachers in Haiti.  Before having a workshop for teachers, I am trying out the material on kids in area elementary schools.  The first lesson was a 1.5 hr Saturday morning program in two different rural villages with kids aged 2 to 15 years old.  I began with the poster of bird silhouettes to identify birds and discuss different groups. (I didn't follow all the  dialogue of the lesson or take kids out with binoculars).  From the first group I learned that the kids didn't know what a silhouette is (even though they speak French), so explained it to the second group as a shadow, and better explained that we don't need binoculars to identify birds, but can use their shape.  They understood this as the hummingbird has a long beak, the woodpecker is on the side of a tree, etc.  The kids didn't know the wading bird silhouette, and I have never seen any in this area.  We called it the kolye, the name for plover and killdeer. They also mentioned crow several times, but it is not on the poster.  They gave me the Haitian Creole names of the birds.  Then volunteers come up front and faced away from the poster to try to name all 10 types of birds on the poster.

Next we used the bird body part poster of Lesson 8.  Students gave me the Creole names of the parts, then I had volunteers come up front in pairs and the 'scientist' showed us the parts on their 'bird.'  We looked at the bird illustrations in the Haiti bird guide, and I asked the kids questions like what color is the eye stripe, or which bird has a black throat.

We then went into the surrounding and used the beginner side of the scavenger hunt cards (after emphasizing that they only use the dry erase markers on the cards).  They had played this came last year using the English language version and searching for only the illustrated items, so I thought with the French version at least the older kids would look for more items since some are described only with text.  But in both groups all the kids stuck to looking for only the illustrated items.  So when I have lessons with only the older kids I will emphasize the written items.  Stay posted for the results of future lessons.