Adopted elephant a lesson for class

LR pupils study, write all about it

The pairing of fifth-graders at Little Rock’s Wakefield Elementary and an orphaned elephant at a Kenyan wildlife sanctuary is proving to be a mutually beneficial partnership.

Wendy Ward Blasingame’s 21 fifth-graders at the southwest Little Rock school are “fostering” Ajabu by contributing $50 this year toward the care of the infant pachyderm that attracted rescuers’ attention last month when it attached itself to tourist vans in southern Kenya.

Baby Ajabu - who wears sunscreen on her floppy ears and does not yet reach the height of a keeper’s waist - is in return helping Little Rock youngsters hone their reading and writing skills, and their social studies and science knowledge.

Main ideas and supporting details, cause and effect, inferences, journal writing and research are among the skills Blasingame’s class are perfecting as the youngsters check the website of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust for news of Ajabu and watch video clips from the sanctuary on the classroom’s electronic white board.

“This activity just lends itself to everything,” Blasingame said about theelephant study and how it ties in with the skills that Wakefield fifth-graders are learning as part of the new national common core education standards.

Public schools in Arkansas and in nearly all 50 states are now basing lessons on those national standards.

Karen James, the Little Rock School District’s director for elementary literacy, said the writing standards for third through fifth grades call for students to conduct short research projects. Fifth-graders, in particular, must use several sources to build knowledge of the different aspects of their end-of-the-year topics.

“The topics can vary greatly across the district,” James said. She offered as another example the research at Little Rock’s Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School into the background of poems and how the work of poets is shaped by their life experiences.

At Wakefield, Blasingame, a 14-year teacher, has led her class in recent days in creating advertisement posters and celebrating Ajabu’s 1-month birthday.

“Raise your hand if you would like to share what you inferred about how Ajabu is feeling after seeing the clip this morning,” Blasingame directed her fully engaged students one day last week.

“Comfortable,” Anissa Montes, 11, replied first. “Playful, “adventurous,” “safe” and “curious” were other responses.

“We want to use evidence from the clip to support the inferences,” Blasingame continued. “Tell me how do you know that Ajabu is playful?”

“She was playing hide-andseek with her keeper,” Anyla Lloyd, 11, reported.

“Does she have the samekeeper every single day?” Blasingame asked.

“No,” said the class. “She would get too attached to the keeper and when he leaves she won’t eat and she won’t sleep, and she’ll get sick,” Armonti Morris, 11, elaborated.

Jaylon Allison, 11, added that orphan elephants need as many keepers as they would have elephants in their herd. Blasingame agreed, adding that assigning a multiple number of keepers to the baby will ultimately help the animal adjust to the size of a herd once it is able to return to the wild.

Blasingame’s pupils spent the rest of the morning reading an article about reintegrating an orphaned elephant into a herd - a process that can take up to 10 years. The children underlined facts about reintegration and wrote them onto a graphics organizer. They would use those facts later in the same day to write their own paragraphs.

“The common core standards tells us exactly what we are supposed to teach,” Blasingame said. “We were supposed to do main ideas and details for two weeks, and now we are doing inferencing. We are focusing this year on informational text so, of course, this is informational.”

As for the topic for the fifthgrade research papers: “It was their choice to continue with this topic,” she said.

Blasingame has used the plight of African elephants killed by poachers for their ivory tusks as a way to engage her classes in past years.

“This year my class insisted that we take it a step further. Instead of just learning about these extraordinary creatures, they wanted to do something to help.”

Blasingame said that after the children learned about the fostering program, they surprised her by putting dollar bills and assorted change onher desk. Within a few days, enough was collected to send to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya.

The trust cares for orphaned elephants of all different ages and then works to return the very social animals to a herd.

The Wakefield pupils decided early on that they wanted to foster one of eight or so animals housed in the trust’s nursery near Nairobi.

The class researched the backgrounds of each baby elephant, Blasingame said. For a homework assignment, each pupil wrote a letter to the teacher explaining his choice for an elephant to foster.

“Ajabu, the youngest, newest baby at the orphanage, won by a landslide. She was only 15 days old on the day our class formally became foster parents,” Blasingame said.

Most of the elephants at the sanctuary were rescued after their mothers died of illnesses, or were killed by poachers or predators. In some cases, the young elephants were left behind when they became too weak or were trapped in manmade water wells.

The fate of Ajabu’s mother is not known, according to the Sheldrick website.

Fittingly the young elephant’s name means “mystery” in Swahili.

The baby was found in early April with a still-attached umbilical cord, causing rescuers who loaded her onto an airplane bound for the Sheldrick nursery to think she was only a day or two old when she began following tourist vans.

Her first hours in captivity were spent bellowing for her mother.

Blasingame’s pupils are full of facts about Ajabu and orphaned elephants in general, and they have developed an overarching purpose - to tell others about the dangers facing the animals that share many characteristics with human beings.

The elephants demonstrate emotions, including grief, Alexander Lopez, 11, said.

They rely on their mother’s milk or a facsimile of that milk for two years, and they are becoming endangered because of the demand on the black market for their tusks for making jewelry.

“Every day 100 elephants are killed for their ivory tusks,” Alexander said when asked what he has learned through the research.

“If they keep on killing elephants just for their tusks, they are going to be extinct,” he said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 17 on 05/12/2013

Upcoming Events