Middle School

I'm the Shortest Tailed Monkey!!

Who Am I?

by JoEllen Underwood

March 14, 2007

Each year 6th grade science students at AMS do an endangered species report. As part of my student mentor job, I'm working with the first period science students and they wanted me to do a report. Mrs. Hanson, 6th grade science teacher, has a very precise packet that we follow. First, we spent 2 days in the library researching our topic and then spent 2 days in the computer lab looking up more references. Our report consists of a written report, a poster, bibliography, and presenting all of this to our class. I choose the uakari because most of us didn't have a clue as to what it was. As you can see by my red face, the uakari (pronounced wa-kar-i) is a red faced monkey and found only in the Amazon River Basin.

My purpose in giving this report was to demonstrate how I thought a report should be given-not just stand and read from the paper. So I included props to show the body proportion, the tail size, what it eats, how much it weighs, etc. I stood up on a desk to show the uakari makes leaps up to 20 feet or more. No, even though they wanted that demonstrated, I didn't try the leap. Hopefully, this will let them see, that with some imagination, how they can make their reports more interesting.