Every day the children practice math skills, counting things such as coconuts.

Every day the children practice math skills, counting things such as coconuts.
By MARALINE KUBIK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
CAMPBELL -- Like many an April morning, the sky is overcast and dreary, the air cool, the lawn soggy outside the Kirwan Center.
Inside, it's another world. Monkeys swing from a canopy of tree branches as colorful toucans watch from their perches. Butterflies emerge from their cocoons and flit about.
Poisonous snakes, spiders and frogs lie in wait, and the children -- about a dozen 3-to-5-year-olds -- scurry around the room, eagerly completing activities that help them to learn about the rain forests of the world and the animals, people, plants and insects that live there.
In the process, they also develop math, reading, language and science skills.
Behind it all
Transforming their Head Start classroom into a rain forest was the work of teacher Tina Lopez, assistant teacher Jerry Blackwell, and helper Marcia Penwell.
Underneath the tangle of branches and ivy, the children excitedly answer their teacher as she quizzes them about the life cycle of a butterfly.
As soon as they finish with the lesson, a little girl jumps up and squeezes a stuffed monkey dangling from a branch above her head. The monkey, in a slightly mechanical voice, begins to squeal. The little girl squeals, too. Then, smiling, she plops back down on the carpet as the teacher directs the children to learning stations around the room.
Two boys, 4- and 5-year-olds, head to the writing station where they carefully copy the names of insects that live in the rain forest. A poster in front of them has pictures of the bugs with their names printed underneath.
Across the room, 3- and 4-year-old girls slip their arms through loops attached to cardboard butterfly wings -- one wears the pink wings, the other wears purple -- and crawl into a child-size corrugated cardboard cocoon. Less than a minute later, the girls emerge as butterflies, having completed their metamorphosis.
They know the meaning
Metamorphosis might be a challenging word for a 3-year-old to pronounce, but all of the children know what it means. They even illustrated their own books, drawing the stages of a butterfly's life. The last page, after the butterfly has completed its metamorphosis, is the most spectacular in almost every child's book.
Every once in a while, Blackwell will spray a fine mist of water from a bottle she carries, aiming at whoever slips under the canopy of trees, entering the rain forest. "It rains in the rain forest," she explained.
At another station, several children huddle around a table piecing together pictures of rain forest animals that are on huge puzzle pieces while a girl at the listening station pages through a storybook about a caterpillar's transformation into a butterfly. A recording of the story plays as she turns the pages. A selection of hand puppets in front of her, including a hungry caterpillar, encourages her to act out the story.
Every day, the children practice math skills, counting things such as coconuts, in their rain forest. They talk about colors while examining the flowers, learn about science studying the life cycles of insects and frogs and discuss the climate and why the sun can't touch the ground because of the canopy of trees, Lopez said.
The children studied the rain forest for five weeks and were so interested that they could have studied it through the end of the school year, she said. "But we're tired of walking into everything," she chuckled, motioning to the branches dangling from the ceiling.
The next project, Lopez added, will be learning about the ocean and the creatures that live in it.
kubik@vindy.com