Thanks to the environmentally conscious teachers at Ocean, select classrooms throughout the building have the opportunity to raise small flock of baby Bobwhite Quails in partnership with the Seatuck Environmental Association. When these baby quail have grown, they will be released into the wild in order to combat the population’s sharp decline.

Since the quails’ entrance into the world through their shells, classrooms been learning everything there is to know about them, as well getting to care for and interact with them.

“This isn’t just a cute project we’re doing,” said first-grade teacher Margaret Anderson. “Along with teaching students about the native species of long island, we’re teaching them concepts like biomimicry—how things that we create mimic things in nature, like flippers used to scuba-dive mimic the webbed feet of a duck—and the difference between wild animals and domestic ones. They’re absorbing so much from having the quails here.”
 
In addition to partnering with the Seatuck Environmental Association, teachers have taken on this project as an inspired result of completing the Greentree Foundation’s Ecology Workshop—a summer program that seeks to provide Long Island teachers with knowledge and techniques to better teach students about the natural world.

“There’s so many benefits of bringing nature into the classroom, and vice versa,” said third grade teacher Katarina Moy, “and this project in particular is teaching them that they can make a difference in the world around them—no matter how small.”