A lesson in primates

You know how some things that you learned in high school or college you said to yourself, "am I really ever going to use this stuff in my life?!?"  Well, fall semester of my senior year, I took an anthropology course titled "Primate Ecology;" I'm not sure how it fit into my liberal studies track of race, gender, and equality, but somehow, being an anthropology class, it did.  In the course of four months, I learned more about monkeys than I ever thought possible, and was convinced that in my career as a classroom teacher I would not, and could not, ever use this information.

Well, it just so happens that we began a science unit on habitats this week, and the first habitat that we are covering is the rainforest!  Do you know how many monkeys live in the rainforest?!?  (A LOT!)  I've been doing a couple of picture sorts with my class on how many legs different animals have, if they are wild or tame, if they live in water or on land, etc., and each time we get to a picture, I ask a child to "pick an animal that you can recognize and come on up to the Smartboard and tell me where it goes."  The first time we were doing a sort earlier this week and one of my students said, "well, I know the monkey . . . " I had an epiphany.  It was like the endless hours of studying for those primate ecology tests, memorizing scientific names (which I can still recite), and even a trip to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, finally paid off and I was able to tell my class things like, "well, that looks like a normal monkey, but it's really an orangutan," and, "you're right, that's a gorilla.  Did you know that they live mostly in Africa?" and, "yup, a gorilla has two legs like a human, but do you know that most gorillas walk on their knuckles?"  (Insert demonstration here.)

It was glorious, y'all.  The "scientist" that one of my students called me earlier in the week really came out, and my kiddos have been asking me about monkeys for days.  So much so that I went to the library last night and checked out a handful of books on primates so that my class had more pictures to look at during their reading time that I wasn't able to show them during our science time.

As my hipster student would say--"that's tight!" :)

So for those of you that think you've learned an "unimportant" thing or two over the years, just wait for it to come full-circle . . . it's so worth it!

I can't wait to wake up tomorrow morning and think TGIF--it's been a great week, but a very long one, and I'm looking forward to some down-time!

Love from Room 106,
Allie