Exciting Science Dinosaur Research Lets Millwood First-Graders Sample Thrills Of Scientific Discovery

The little dinosaur hunters studied their maps and dug. With gloved hands, with plastic shovels, with bare hands.

And when they actually found dinosaur bones, they ran, flying across the playground toward Shelby Rothstrom.

“Teacher! Teacher!” they yelped, waving their bones.

“Oh, my goodness, our first discovery,” said Rothstrom, with a practiced sense of wonder. After all, Rothstrom has been teaching for 19 years, and she knows how to motivate first-graders.

This fossil hunt comes early in a six-week unit on dinosaurs taught by Rothstrom and Heather Jordan at the Millwood Early Childhood Education Center.

The learning unit doesn’t come out of any pre-packaged curriculum. It was created by these two teachers during hours and hours of planning meetings, evening phone calls and mid-day consultations.

To say nothing of the effort of John Rothstrom, Shelby’s husband, who procured the bones for the fossil hunt. November’s power outage did in John Rothstrom’s cache of frozen bones. So during Christmas break, while Shelby and Jordan raided libraries for scores of dinosaur books - each checked out 80 - and worked on their planning effort, John Rothstrom went from butcher to rendering plant, begging bones to boil and bleach.

Now that the little paleontologists have their dinosaur bones in hand, they’ll measure them, write about them, make a museum of them. They’ve already created casts and plaster of paris reproductions. They’ll work on their reading, with dinosaur books and dinosaur poems.

They’ll write sentence upon sentence in their dinosaur journals.

They’ll do dinosaur math. And using chocolate-covered cherries, they’ll learn about earth science - the core, the magma and the crust of the earth.

The two teachers could be sisters. They finish sentences for each other. Jordan makes extra copies of school materials for Rothstrom, “when I think she might forget.” And Rothstrom offers Jordan, teaching her first year in her own classroom, this benediction: “She has teacher blood in her.”

The two got to know each other last year, when Jordan substituted for another first-grade teacher at Millwood.

Rothstrom, 41, mentors Jordan, 25. Jordan feeds ideas and excitement back to Rothstrom.

“In 19 years of teaching, there have only been one or two people that I have worked with, planned with and trusted to do as much of the follow-through as I have Heather,” Rothstrom said.

The two have classrooms conveniently across the hall from each other and, as the only first-grade teachers at Millwood, they make a natural team.

As they design their teaching plan week by week, they incorporate skills required by the district’s curriculum.

The science skills in this unit, for instance, are: observe, classify, collect and organize, predict.

But they collect their materials themselves, ranging from dinosaur wrapping paper - laminated in sections, it’ll make great covers for the dinosaur journals - to maps, posters, and lesson ideas they’ve put together in past years. And those library books. Eighty, each. Each teacher uses two library cards, their own and belonging to the school. Rothstrom actually saved the printout from her list of dinosaur books last year and incorporated it into her planning for this year. She organizes her library books with colored sticky dots, which she peels off before returning the books.

Each maintains detailed records of what they expect to do, hour by hour. And in the margins of their calendars, they make notes about how well things went, tricks to remember next year.

“I make a list every day of thing I need to bring from home,” Jordan said. Even though this is her first full year of teaching, she substituted last year. And wherever she worked as a sub, she made copies of materials, to start her own personal collection of “teacher stuff.”

Jordan says she puts in so much time outside the classroom, she’s not sure how she would fit in time to raise children herself.

“And my husband wants kids,” she says.

The two teachers talk by phone every evening. John Rothstrom works nights as a nurse at Sacred Heart, so sometimes the two women are on the phone until 11 p.m. And even then, they say, one may get a great idea in the middle of the night.

Some things, they make sure happen every day. Writing, for instance. The day before the fossil hunt, each student wrote a letter to ask permission to conduct a dig.

“Sometimes they ask me how many sentences I want them to write,” Rothstrom said. “I say ‘You could write 100 sentences. Maybe 50.’ And they say, ‘I’ll do eight.”’ That’s fine with Rothstrom, who believes that children get the urge to write when they have an exciting experience to write about. One first-grader last year wrote this in one entry in his dinosaur journal: “My bone is skinny. And it had a bruise on it. I think it looks like a dog bone.”

“Here,” Rothstrom boasts gently, “I have a first grader writing 37 sentences about dinosaurs.”

Along with the time involved in planning, comes expense.

Each teacher is allotted $500 for a year’s materials. They overrun the limit.

How much?

“I don’t want to tell you,” Jordan said.

“In actuality, we probably spend about $100 a month.

“I spent $75 for markers for the white boards. They’re very expensive,” Rothstrom.

“I probably spend $100 a month. And I have a lot of things already. That’s just doing the things I have to have to be excited.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)