Archive for December 2010

Dec
17

Houston Zoo Education Department Receives AZA Diversity Award

Posted by in Education Office

In September of this year the Houston Zoo hosted the annual AZAConference. AZA stands for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and it is an accreditation organization that recognizes the zoos and aquariums in the country with the highest level of animal care, conservation, science education and family fun.

The Houston Zoo won the 2010 Excellence of Diversity Award for our Target Title I Scholarship. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums recognizes the value of human diversity in all endeavors.  Through the Excellence of Diversity Award, AZA recognizes significant achievement in diversity by AZA member institutions. Recognition is based on programs designed to increase diversity through education, training, community service, recruitment/retention, interpretative exhibition, public relations, and/or marketing. The award recognizes the most significant, innovative, productive, far-reaching, program that promotes diversity in institutions throughout AZA.

The Target Title I scholarship was made possible through a generous donation from Target. With this donation we were able to provide free educational classes to over 50 Title I schools in the Houston area. Schools were able to choose from our 60-minute Adventure Class or our 20-minute Critter Encounter. Topics for the classes include; many kinds of animals, habitats, adaptations, survival gear, and Texas animals to name just a few.

Each class provided a fun, interactive learning experience that included biofacts such as animal skins, skulls, and mounts. Also, the students were provided with the opportunity to touch a live animal. Not only does this money provide students with free educational classes, but they are able to gain up close and personal experiences with animals that they would otherwise not have a chance to see. If you are interested in more information on the Target Title I Scholarship please visit www.houstonzoo.org/education.

Written by Elizabeth Fries and Martha Petre

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Dec
10

Teaching with Teeth

Posted by in Animal Fun Facts,Classes/Programs,Featured

A clouded leopard skull model is great for teaching about carnivore teeth. Check out those canines!

There are many different types of teeth inside a mammal‘s mouth. This makes it easy for us to tell what a mammal eats, just by looking at its teeth.  In the Education department, we teach about the three main groups of “eaters.”  For these lessons, we use a variety of skull biofacts to show the different types of teeth.

Carnivores are animals that eat meat.  They have large, sharp canine teeth for catching their food, with scissor-like molars to help tear meat into smaller pieces.  Any of the cat skulls work well for this group, but my favorite is either a cougar or clouded leopard.  They are smaller, so they are easier to take on programs, and the clouded leopard has huge canines.  At the zoo, our mammalian carnivores include lions, cheetahs, and African wild dogs. 

Take a look at the flat molars in the capybara's mouth. They're prefect for grinding plants.

Herbivores are animals that eat plants.  They have flat, grinding molars with “clipping” teeth in the front.  Some herbivores don’t even have teeth in the front!  I like to use a model of a capybara skull for my sample herbivore. We have many members of this group at the Zoo, including giraffes, elephants, antelope, porcupines, and lemurs. 

Once I’ve taught kids about these two types of teeth, I always bring out a “mystery skull.”  I’ll carry it around, let them touch it, and then ask for votes on what the animal eats.  Most of the time I can’t fool them; they figure out that it is a trick question and the animal is really an omnivore.  Omnivores are animals that eat “everything” (that’s the “omni” in the word).  Typically that means a combination of both plants and meat.  These animals have some combination of both types of teeth.  They typically have sharp, carnivore-like teeth in the front and flat, herbivore-like teeth in the back.  Omnivores at the Zoo include raccoons, maned wolves, grizzly and Andean bears, and most of our primates. 

The "mystery skull" omnivore I use: a raccoon!

Of course, there are lots of other “ivores” at the Zoo, like insectivores, piscivores, nectarivores, and frugivores.  (That’s bugs, fish, nectar, and fruit eaters, if you wanted to know.)  We’ll even teach about sanguinivores (blood eaters) from time to time, although we don’t have any on exhibit at the Houston Zoo. The next time you visit, imagine the teeth inside your favorite mammal’s mouth.  They might reveal more than you think!

Now imagine all the mammals in the Zoo, and all the different things they eat.  This holiday season you can help us feed our mammals (and everybody else, too) by donating to our Give the Gift of Grub campaign! You can make your tax-deductible donation at www.houstonzoo.org/gift-of-grub. or, click our our CONTRIBUTE tab on Facebook! Email development@houstonzoo.org for more information.

The Zoo is doing a month-long series on how and what we feed our over 6,000 animals on the general Zoo blog. You can read them all by visiting: http://www.houstonzooblogs.org/zoo/category/feeding-our-animals/

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Dec
08

Tour of the BEC: Resource Spaces

Posted by in Education Office

The library lives along one wall of our conference room.

In the BEC we have a conference room, which is used by many Zoo departments for meetings.  It’s also the darkest, most enclosed room in the office section, so this is where our overnight teachers usually choose to sleep.  One of the shorter walls is covered by shelves – this is our library, which I keep organized and orderly with the help of my coworkers.  Other than the library and camp T-shirts on the walls, our conference room is not too different than any other conference room in any other office.

We’ll end our tour with two storage rooms that are more exciting than your average closet: the biofact rooms.  Biofact is a compound word that we use to describe anything non-living that we use for our programs.  It’s a shortening of the phrase “biological artifact.” 

Our mammal biofact room, with a wide array of skulls and other artifacts

These biofacts include everything from shed feathers and preserved poop to skins and skulls saved from the real thing.  About half of the skulls and other bones in our collection are real; the rest are plastic models.  The real items are from a couple different sources.  Some were saved from our animals when they passed away, some were confiscated items from CITES-listed endangered species, and some were donated by private citizens or other organizations. 

We use these items in our classes and programs.  It’s much easier to illustrate the difference between herbivore and carnivore teeth with skulls of the animals, for example, and most people will never get a chance to touch a live sea turtle or tiger.   Biofacts in our collection are treated with respect; they are scientific specimens that (for some) were once living animals and they are stored and handled as such.

Our non-mammal biofact room, including the bins of puppets along the floor

There are two biofact rooms: the larger one is taken up almost entirely by mammal biofacts.  We have a lot of mammal items; many of them are quite large.  The smaller biofact room houses everything else; our reptile items are also fairly numerous, but much smaller, requiring less space.  Our bird collection is respectable, although as a bird nerd I wish it were a bit more extensive, and we also have some fish, amphibian, and invertebrate mounts and models.  There are bins on the floor all the way around the room for puppets.  Puppets are fun for younger audiences – it is often easier to demonstrate movement with a puppet, and skulls are hard to understand for many little ones.  They can’t picture where the eyes or nose would go, so a puppet can show what a skull can’t.  Just like with the biofacts, we have more mammal puppets than anything else.  Bears and lions just seem to be more popular as toys than hornbills or lizards.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our tour of the Brown Education Center!  Now that you’ve seen our building, maybe you’ll join us for one of our many programs and get a chance to experience it in person.

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Dec
07

Photography is Fun

Posted by in Classes/Programs

On Saturday I got to teach one of my favorite classes here at the Zoo.  It’s called Point, Click, Zoo, and it a beginning-level photography class for adults. 

One of the "bad" photos I use in the class. Everyone can tell what's wrong with this one!

 

This is a class we offer less frequently than most of the rest of our programs, and I always look forward to it.  We start with a quick review of the basics of the manual settings on an SLR camera.  (These are the bigger, professional-type cameras with the ability to change settings like shutter speed and aperture).  Then we jump into a discussion of “bad” photos (taken by yours truly) that have something specific that can be fixed.  (Of course, when I ask the class to tell me what’s wrong with the photos, at least one gets a whole list of things that I could have done better.  I set myself up for critiques by using my own photos, so I know it’s coming.)  After each picture we discuss how to deal with the specific issue, and then I get to show a “good” version of the same picture.  This is a fun way to address the problems that often crop up in zoo photography, like mesh, glare from glass, or blur from action. 

We follow these photography concepts with a discussion of tips that apply specifically to animals (expect movement, be patient, etc.).  Then the class gets to practice with some live animals in the classroom.  To finish, we venture out on grounds to practice some more at animal exhibits. 

Photography is fun, albeit challenging, especially when animals are involved.  The popularity of this class and our Photo Days at the Zoo proves it time and time again.  If you are a fan of photography, the next opportunity at the Zoo is a Photo Day on December 18th.  We’ve got our dates set for Point, Click, Zoo for next year, and registration will be open after the first of the year.  I hope you get a chance to take some great shots on your next visit!

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Dec
01

Tour of the BEC: Education Office

Posted by in Classes/Programs,Education Office

A look at our colorful education offices!

It should come as no surprise that a group of creative people work in a colorful space.  The walls and workspaces themselves aren’t so colorful (with one very blue exception), but instead it is the personalized decorations that everyone has used to adorn their spaces.  Photos of family, animal pictures from magazines, sample crafts and thank-you certificates hang on cubicle dividers and walls.  I even have an old graphic from the llama exhibit on my wall! 

The Education side of things is a little more populous than the Volunteer side.  We have eight cubicles, six of which are occupied by Education Specialists, and three side offices for the two supervisors, our education manager, and the two members of our interpretive team.  Wondering what those extra cubicles are for? One is the home base for our eight part-time teachers, the wonderful crew who lead our Wild Wink overnights (and yes, they sleep at the Zoo during their programs).  The other is currently not in use, but provides a great workspace for our Camp Zoofari interns over the summer.

The eleven people who occupy these offices (plus the part-time staff who occasionally share it) are responsible for all of our variety of education programs.  From Camp Zoofari and ZooMobiles to on-grounds programming like the Zooper Challenge, for everyone from toddlers in our Wild Wheels program to seniors on our Senior Safari, the team that uses this space does it all!

Our last stops on the tour are well-organized resource spaces – check back for the final post!

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