Students in the Friends Academy Pre-K classes stepped into a new world on a recent Thursday morning, visiting the Lower School Science Lab for the first time to explore a classroom they’ll visit often as kindergarteners in the fall. The big smiles had nothing to do with the magnifying glasses they held up to their faces.
The two Pre-K classes met Mrs. Katie Schlicht, the Lower School science teacher, and experienced different stations relating to the Northern Bobwhite Quail Project — a conservation program done annually in partnership with the Center for Environmental Education and Discovery.
Mrs. Schlicht guides students to incubate and hatch more than a dozen quail eggs, and then take care of the chicks for two weeks in a brooder. After two weeks, the quails will be brought to Clark Botanic Garden in Albertson, where they will be cared for until they are fully grown. This summer, the quails from Friends Academy and other schools will be released into the wild around Long Island to help combat the surging tick population.
“It’s a special visit for the Pre-K students because they get to feel like big kids,” Mrs. Schlicht says. “It’s so important that our Lower School has a science program that is separate from the students’ regular classrooms. It allows all of them to step into a space to do experiments, explore their curiosities, and be real scientists.”
The quail project, Mrs. Schlicht says, is an opportunity to teach students about an important bird species in our local ecosystem that is a native predator of ticks.
Students learn about predator-prey relationships, animal life cycles, egg incubation, chick brooding, habitat restoration, and how to be a citizen scientist through inquiry-based learning. One of the biggest takeaways is understanding the importance of a balanced ecosystem: over time, ticks have increased while the quail population has decreased due to a surge in predators such as cats, foxes, and hawks.
The Pre-K students had the chance to lay their hands flat in the brooder and have the quail chicks walk across the palms of their hands. They also had the opportunity to use magnifying glasses to explore close-up details of the recently hatched quail eggs, as well as the nests and feathers from an array of birds. At the end of their visit, Mrs. Schlicht had students sit on the rug and asked for their reaction to the chicks: “Soft! Cute! Lovely! Beautiful!”
“There’s a real purpose with this program,” Mrs. Schlicht says. “We’re helping to repopulate the quail on Long Island, and students are learning about stewardship by taking care of animals and our planet. The big curriculum connection is interdependence and ecosystems, but there’s so much more going on in the classroom. I love seeing the empathy that students have for the chicks — it’s so special to see how they react to a living thing.”
Photography by Alvin Caal / Friends Academy
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