THOM 14 | Fall/Winter 2020

“BURYING BEETLES,” TEACHER JENNY
Ladson calls out. Ryan and Shawn jump up,
exchange high-fives and fall into comfortable
banter about basketball and beetles. Ryan lives
little more than a mile from Shawn, but they rarely
see each other. Ryan attends Brookwood School,
and Shawn attends Harper Elementary School.
For eight months both were part of coLAB, a
collaboration of 64 Brookwood and Harper third
graders digging into the art and science of the
burying beetle. They learned to sew and pin
beetles, studied pollination and food webs with
entomologists, identified bug sounds and felt the
tingle of hissing cockroaches crawling up their
arms. And in the end produced an exhibition of
sketches, prints, murals, writing and 3-D art about
the importance of bugs in our ecosystem.
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