Project update, February 2002
Last week, Tim Alley made a terrific interactive presentation on shrimping to our first and second grade class. The part about all shrimp being born as males and then all changing to females, had huge appeal for the four adult females in the room. Personally, I found the process to be extremely threatening.

Mrs. Russell's newsletter, which is on her current webpage, describes the event. Thanks to your generosity, we were able to videotape it and I will have my G & T group edit it to reasonable length after the Feb. vacation break.

This week, my second grade G & T group finally completed their lobster board games. They'll play the game with their classmates when we get back from vacation. Iíll get photos to you of course.

Tim and I have outlined our plans for data collection and communication that we will begin when he goes back to lobstering. We should get your input on this before then.

Project update, January 2002
In mid December, Tim Alley invited the second grade class to make a trip to the Fishermen's Coop here in So. Bristol to see a typical day's catch and go aboard his boat. I put a description and photos of the visit on our web site. http://lincoln.midcoast.com/~sbes/AAB/AAB_Pg_2.html

The expedition was very successful and we appreciate the time Tim has spent working with us! The children all wrote cards of thanks to him. I might scan some of them and add them to our web site. The Gifted and Talented subgroup of three second graders are developing a board game that is based on the travels of a lobster from ocean floor to dinner table. We have had many delays due to weather and holidays but they should be finished in a couple of weeks.

Also in December, Ms. Durrell's fifth/sixth grade class did a preliminary in-class survey about fish consumption and commercial fishing. The class will revise the survey and administer it to the whole school sometime in late February. We would appreciate your input on improvements to this instrument.Check out the results of the in-class survey about fish consumption!

Tim will be starting shrimp fishing in mid February. He will be describing the work and demonstrating his gear to our second graders early next month. We hope to use the digital movie camera at that time. The second grade team will edit the movies and make a short presentation film using iMovie.

Project summary
•Children brainstorm an interview with our boat captain to find out what commercial fishing is. With questions in hand, they record an interview and return to write it up. They produce a presentation for their classmates as well as a web page. Perhaps we involve older students with the web page and/or the presentation.
Check out an interview by the second grade group!

•We have administered a first-attempt survey instrument to the sixth graders and have a subset of them tallying results and improving the instrument. We will then administer it to all students here at SBS. We are on a two week time frame for this. Check out the survey!

•Tim is now going to set up a second grade field trip to the South Bristol Fisherman's Coop.

•Children brainstorm and produce interviews with boat captain’s family to determine how a commercial
fisherman’s family is affected by his occupation and/or family contributions to the business. Write it up and
present to class and produce web page.

•Children shadow our captain and figure out where and when he uses mathematics. Write it up and produce
presentation and web page. Could be done with other school subjects as the focus-biology, physics,
economics, geography, etc.

•Children track catches and fishing activities (areas fished, traps set, bait used, etc.), weather, season,
catches by others.

•Children find out what happens to catch after it is brought in-sold to whom, track to end consumer?
Write up, presentation, web page.

•Children communicate (mail, email, web pages) with children in southern U.S. who live in fishing
communities in order to discover similarities and differences compared to our local fishing industry.
Check out a letter from Mrs. Russell's class to Ms. Phillips' class in Spartanburg!

•Fiction and nonfiction reading material must be found for the group and will be used between the
hands-on activities. Possible topics include 

-boats and boatbuilding
-weather
-sea creatures
-fishing
-ocean resource management
-fishing and fishermen

We consider collaboration and sharing of information and experiences with all students to be an
important component of the G&T program and therefore would include it in all the projects/activities.
The specific lesson plans would be tied to the Maine Learning Results.