Like most of the 54 other 3rd graders at Clay Elementary School in Woodstock, Zac Behrns took his assignment seriously. His mission was to create a model of an insect or spider of his choice.
Zac zeroed in on the black widow spider, as did a large percentage of the other boys in the two 3rd-grade classes taught by Cheryl Carper and Wendy Kay. The girls leaned predominantly toward ladybugs.
Not content with simply fashioning an oversized black widow spider, Zac decided to put it into a companion model of the deadly spider’s favorite habitat–the legendary outhouse of Sears & Roebuck catalog fame.
“Creating a habitat earned extra credit,” Carper said. “Zac read that black widows lived in outhouses, and so he built a model outhouse for his spider.”
Each of the youngsters had three weeks to select an insect and make a model. The finished products will be in the school library for another two weeks.
One of the most striking features of the model collection was the innovation of the model-makers themselves. “What impressed me was that so many of the models were built with recycled materials,” Carper said.
Heather Stahl’s exhibit on the life cycle of a butterfly featured a caterpillar fashioned from a green sock and a cocoon made from coiled clothesline. Nick Rajsky made a very realistic “walking stick” from some twigs, then “hid” the insect in its natural habitat–a clump of similarly colored twigs–to demonstrate camouflage in the wild.
Probably none, however, pushed the recycling aspect of the project as far as Emily Matusek, whose styrofoam ladybug saw prior service as Mars during a space project earlier in the year.
“I just cut Mars in half and added stuff to make it look like a ladybug,” Emily said, as though transforming a planet into an insect were an everyday occurrence.
The heavy use of recycled materials fits in well with the school’s overall philosophy, Carper said.
“We want to give the kids options that don’t require a lot of money. What we really don’t want is parents going out to buy expensive models or materials.”
Although the collection leans heavily toward spiders and ladybugs, there were a few other species represented, like Chelsey Stack’s clay tarantula and Cameron Cross’ intricately detailed dragonfly.
“I decided to build a dragonfly because they’re hard to study (in the wild) because they fly so fast,” Cross said. “I had to read about them to see what they look like.”
