Students in Derrick Richling’s fourth-grade class at Walton 21st Century Rural Life Center are learning some of the typical things students their age would learn.
Their current unit covers math, science and reading.
But instead of pouring over textbooks and scribbling answers on worksheets, the children are learning through a more hands-on approach.
The children are making bat houses as a fund-raiser for classroom and playground supplies.
Last year, Richling’s fourth graders made butterfly houses, raising more than $1,000, some of which went to charity.
As a part of the project, the children not only participate in the hands- on construction of the bat houses, which resemble bird houses, but they also are enhancing their academic skills in the process.
Hands-on learning and a science-based curriculum is nothing new to these students, who are greeted daily by the classroom turtle and a fish tank full of butterflies.
As Richling helped students put nails into the bat houses, he challenged his students to figure how much profit they were making on their bat houses.
The students are selling the bat houses for $10 a piece.
Each of the 23 students is building a bat house so that was $230 in revenue.
Richling spent $106 in lumber for the bat houses.
“What is our profit?” he said.
A crop of hands sprouted around the room.
One of the students sprung to his feet and began working the problem at the chalkboard - $124.
Richling unfurled an air house and attached a nail gun. He helped the first student set up a bat house, which Richling referred to as a bat condominium because each house will house up to three bats. Snap, snap, snap – an air compressor in the back of the room shuttered to life. The children jumped as the nail gun drove the nails into the first house.
“You don’t want to nail your fingers,” Richling said. “Does anyone remember what PSI stands for?”
One child pipes up, “It has something to do with square inches.”
“Who here weighs about 100 pounds?” Richling said.
Richling located a boy who thought he weighed about 90 pounds.
He said if this boy stood on a one square inch peg leg and stood on your hand, that is what it would be like to be hit with a nail with the pressure of 100 pounds per square inch, Richling said.
The children seemed impressed.
But that was not all the children have been learning during this project. Before they ever got hands on with the bat houses, they had to learn about the creatures that would inhabit them.
