BonnerSprings.com

Christmas came early this year for a special group, thanks to the efforts of students throughout USD 204.

On Friday, second-graders at Edwardsville Elementary, with help from Bonner Springs High School students, donated several wooden homes they built for the bats of Wyandotte County.

For the past month and a half, the Edwardsville second-graders have been learning everything they could about bats for their expeditionary learning project. The culmination of their efforts came earlier this month when then traveled to BSHS to make bat boxes with the help of BSHS students taking woods classes.

Three Edwardsville Elementary classes participated in the project. On Friday, the first set of boxes made by students in Michelle Howell’s class were donated to the Mr. & Mrs. F.L. Schlagle Library, in Wyandotte County Park in Kansas City, Kan. After winter break, students in Andrea Netzer and Kerry Wylie’s classes will make their donations to the Bonner Springs and Edwardsville parks departments.

The bat boxes, wooden structures that give bats a place to rest out of the elements, will be placed throughout various parks in the county to help accommodate a growing bat population.

Prior to the elementary students’ arrival at BSHS, the wood pieces for the bat boxes were precut by the wood shop students. Edwardsville’s second-graders then had the opportunity to help nail and drill the pieces together while learning from the high school students about the building process.

Kris Munsch, the wood shop teacher at BSHS, said the experience of building the boxes together was one that would benefit both the younger and older students.

“It lets the big kids be like the little kids for short time,” Munsch said. “(The high school students) learn the tenderness of these little kids and help shape them through their teaching.”

This is the second time Munsch has reached out to the younger generation of students. In the past, his wood shop students have helped another set of elementary school students build bird houses for a project.

“It makes their work relevant,” Munsch said of the high-schoolers’ outlook on helping the younger generation. “So often they are making things for themselves, but I think they like the idea of doing something for others.”

Howell said when the second-grade teachers got together to decide what their EL expedition project would be for the first semester, they wanted to incorporate science and animals. They landed on studying bats and used the topic as a common thread among all their school subjects, including science and language arts.

“We wanted them to understand how bats help mankind and are a part of our ecology,” Howell said.

Students learned about the bats habitat as well as their hunting and feeding habits. Throughout the month, students studied bat facts and made posters and wrote stories using the information they learned about bats.

Howell said the interaction of the younger students with the older students made her second-graders excited for the long-term learning process.

That interaction and the donation they were able to make, she said, gave them a boost of self-esteem.

“I think they felt good about themselves,” Howell said. “I think they felt like they impacted their environment.”

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