New Haven Independent

Now the secret is out because second-grade teacher Roberta McCarthy (pictured) and the school’s educational consultant Dr. June Levy (pictured below) recently hit pay dirt. They won for the school a $9,000 grant, in national competition, from the Toyota Tapestry Foundation for a project called “The Worms Go In and the Worms Come Out.”

The goal of the year-long curriculum, derived from the grant, is to teach integrated literacy and science skills so that all 67 second-graders at Celentano, and through them, the entire school, will think like scientists. This school is playful but also serious about worming their way, through hands-on, project-based learning, into preparation for the first-ever Connecticut Mastery Tests in science, which will be administered to fifth and eighth graders next year.

Standing at one of the school’s two worm bins, Danny Skinner, designated one of the day’s docents in keeping with Celentano’s museum-themed education, showed he has learned a thing or two about the interdependence of life. “After the worms eat the lettuce I am leaving on top of the soil, they leave their …”

At this point Danny hesitated to say the the scientific term referring to the worms’ waste products. At the promptings of his second- grade colleague Edward Vega, Jr. and the chorus of proud teachers behind them (left to right: Shirley Hays, McCarthy, and Erin Fitzpatrick), Danny came through. “…they leave their castings.” And what are castings? Danny was asked. “P -o -o-p.” he spelled it out so as not, of course, to have to say it aloud. “But then the plants grow in the soil the worms make, and people and animals eat the plants, and we recycle the lettuce back into the soil, and it starts again.”

“A lot of our urban kids,” said Principal Laura Russo (standing with June Levy) don’t have backyards. They don’t have opportunity for primary source research that connects them to the interdependence of life. Through this grant, now they will. Our children know that lettuce does not grow at Stop & Shop. Out there,” she said, pointing through the window into the interior yard of the school, which was snow-covered, “will be our arboretum.”

“That’s a living museum,” Levy added. “We’ll use the dirt the worms have fertilized and plant vegetables and trees, and the kids will become backyard ecologists.” The grant, Levy pointed out, will buy new, better aerated worm bins, individual subscriptions for all the second graders to the kid-oriented editions of National Geographic, Nature, and Scholastic. “We’re also going to buy digital cameras and printers to observe and document the project, as scientists must do.”

Russo, Levy, and the teachers were eager to point out the project and inquiry-based learning across the grades and curriculua at the school begin with experimentation based on kids’ natural curiosity: How see without eyes, or smell without a nose? After the science strategies — observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting — the kids go outside the classroom for more research. (Celentano, as the city’s museum-themed school. has ongoing relationships with the Peabody, and historical organizations; Levy herself was the founder of New Haven’s Children’s Museum.) Then the kids come back to the classroom for secondary research and become — you guessed it: bookworms.

The school’s radio news team will regularly broadcast to the rest of the school the progress of the bins, the worms, and the arboretum. Third-graders will be reusing the compost to research the life cycle of plants, and fifth graders will be studying photosynthesis. “One of the great drawbacks of No Child Left Behind,” added Russo, “is that they teach and test all these subjects as if they were not interconnected. That’s not what learning is or the way the world works.”

The teachers and Celentano staff were, if anything, as excited and proud of their worms as the kids. Cathy Blake-Parker, the school’s library media specialist, pointed out that the worms Danny and Edward were studying were, as she put it, “the grand critters” of worms originally donated, as part of an environmental education grant, to the schools in the 1990s by the city’s Public Works Department. “Did you know,” McCarthy asked a reporter, whose second-grade teacher was completely fearful of critters, “that these red worms have five pairs of hearts? That’s right. Pairs. They’re simple, of course, but five. The kids wanted to know why, if we are advanced, as humans, we have only one. Something didn’t seem right to them. This kind of curiosity launches study in comparison of the human and worm bodies. And this goes across the curriculum. We teach math and measuring and graphing by stretching gummy bears, measuring them, and then eating them, of course. Yummy. Oh, then we estimate the number of red gummy bears in a bag.”

Welcome to statistics.

“Oh,” added McCarthy whose enthusiasm for worms curls through all her conversation, “how do worms hear without ears? Well, the kids would be happy to show you how the critters will indeed hear if we make a clatter with tuning forks and loud instruments …”

“And there are absolutely no behavior problems,” added Levy when the kids are so deeply engaged.”

Has all this worm-ology had an effect on what Danny and Edward are going to do when they grow up? Edward said he wanted to be a policeman, and that he would arrest people who threw out trash or polluted the environment. And Danny, who was still searching for the red worms in the bin, admitted that, despite the influence of his teachers, he was still determined to be a wrestler. “But, I learned that when the bird tries to take the worm from the ground, the worm has to hang on tight. Like a wrestler.”