Animal Science Mentoring - Zoology Ecology & Biology for Gifted & Curious Kids

In this self-led learning class, students will be guided with short videos to identify an area of interest, given real-time individualized suggestions for further research, and then complete a project of their choice to model or present their findings. This class can be amazingly beneficial for both gifted learners and children who need an alternative learning style.

Each pre-recorded video lesson for this class will be short and generalized. Students and families will need to initiate direct communication so that I can provide valuable individualized support. I am very responsive to written messages but students can also upload video of themselves to the classroom to ask questions or show me their work! There will be no live meetings in this self-paced class. To get the full benefits of this class please utilize me as a resource. I continually encourage students to communicate throughout the process.

Examples of what this class might look like:

Perhaps a student is interested in endangered species and concerned about habitat loss. I could provide a hands-on lab to demonstrate animal population counts, provide a resource where endangered species are documented on the IUCN Red List, introduce some vocabulary such as biodiversity and subspecies, and finally suggest a project. Their project could be creating a meme to raise public awareness, or writing a letter to the EPA to suggest a change.

Another student may express an interest in wolves. If they have curiosity about how wolves have different colored eyes and coat then I could show them how inheritance works and introduce vocabulary such as phenotype and heterozygous. I would guide them to discover that the number of black wolves vs grey wolves varies with distemper outbreaks in a population. For their project, they might choose to create a poster with a wolf pedigree, illustrating inheritance.

All links to resources that are not outschool approved resources will be sent to parents, so that parents will have the ability to share them with their child if they feel comfortable. I frequently provide links to websites such as PBS learning media, university publications, government websites, etc. Parents should feel comfortable using the resources for their child's learning but I have a huge respect for parent choice. 

Students benefit from parents facilitating research with library books and videos so that they can have the gratification of self-discovery and learn research skills. In one of my weekly videos I talk about what a reliable resource is and students benefit from seeing examples for themselves. There may also be a need for families to purchase or use existing supplies for whatever project their child chooses.