Sound searching — Island explorers learn about habitat

By A.J. O'CONNELL
The Stamford Times

October 27, 2006

STAMFORD — On a cold, sunny Tuesday, a cluster of third graders from Davenport Elementary School are walking on their toes through the edges of the salt marsh at Cove Island Park, trying to emulate the great blue heron.

"Tip-toe like a heron through the salt marsh, find a blade of cord grass, run your fingers up it, and then, if you're up to it, taste it," called Callie Gecewicz, an educator from SoundWaters. "What does it taste like?"

"Salt water!" yelled eight-year-old Scott Fraser.

Down the beach, educator Emily Brewster was with another group studying a sandy beach, and in another part of the park, educator Dione Clinkenbeard was huddled with a group of students studying the shellfish of the rocky-intertidal zone.

"What's the best part of the rocky inter-tidal zone? The rocks," she said.

The third graders, who spent two hours on Cove Island on Tuesday, were learning about local saltwater habitats as part of the SoundWaters' Island Explorers program. The grant-funded program is in its third year of teaching local third and fourth graders about the area's coastal regions, said SoundWaters' director of education Kathy Rhodes.

The point of the program, she said, is to educate the children about habitats.

For this program, SoundWaters works with one grade at each elementary school in Stamford and some schools in Greenwich and Norwalk. Each school decides whether the third or fourth grade will work with SoundWaters, based on their curriculum schedule. The children learn about the natural state of each habitat along the Long Island Sound, and learn about the impact of humans on those areas.

The lessons are delivered in two sessions.

Last week, SoundWaters sent their educators to Davenport school to speak to the third grade classes of Ronald Blois, Marisa Rosa, Geraldine Daly, Lois Fernandes and Joanne Lombardi. This week, the classes came to the educators at SoundWaters' base on Cove Island.

Daly who was outside with her class and Clinkenbeard, studying crabs in the rocky inter-tidal zone, are pleased with the program. It is the second year her classroom participated in the project.

"They do a good job," she said, adding that her students responded well to the classroom visit and were excited to go to Cove Island Tuesday.

"We go to the schools and bring animals," said Rhodes. "Kids are asked to observe the animals and identify them. Then they come here and start looking at the habitats."

"We're going to talk about the four things an animal does in a habitat," said Gecewicz, as she ran her group through some of the basics in the SoundWaters' Museum before bringing them out to the field, "Feeding, breeding, nesting and resting."

Because the program was designed to match the Connecticut State science content standards for grades three and four, the students already have a working knowledge of what a habitat is, said Rhodes, and are aware of some of the subjects studied in the Island Explorers program, such as the five things animals require in a habitat: air, water, food, shelter and space.

"[At this level] they all know what a habitat is," said Rhodes.

SoundWaters is a non-profit agency dedicated to protecting the Long Island Sound through education. Its educators, Rhodes said, are trying to explain that just because a habitat may seem dangerous or dangerous, it is not necessarily bad.

"We explain that there's no such thing as a bad habitat, there are just habitats that aren't right for a particular animal," she said.