By Karen Gutierrez
The Cincinnati Enquirer

RYLAND - It's late at night in Costa Rica, and Northern Kentucky teacher Annette Boehm has just seen the most amazing thing: An endangered sea turtle laying eggs on a moonlit beach.

Annette Boehm teaches science class at Ryland Heights Elementary School. (Steven M. Herppich photo) | ZOOM |

She has to record this moment for her students at home. Back at the hotel, her travel companions are already asleep, so Boehm huddles in the bathroom.

"As I peered into the egg chamber, perhaps 10 to 15 leathery, moist eggs glistened in the nest," she writes. "Every few moments her short, pointy tail would jerk or convulse and one or two ping-pong-ball-shaped eggs would plop silently out."

Boehm will do just about anything to share her love of science with children.

A fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Ryland Heights Elementary School in rural Kenton County, her passion and skill is the reason the school's science test scores were second-highest out of 12 schools in the district last year, Principal Cathy Barwell says.

Boehm, 40, regularly gives up her lunch hour to review science lessons with as many as 20 students, who bring their lunch trays to her classroom.

She's already setting up science experiments in a new laboratory. And nearly every day, she finds a way to work real life into her teaching.

Boehm gets her scientific curiosity in part from her father, a soybean researcher who didn't retire until the age of 72. In 2000, Boehm's parents accompanied her to Costa Rica on a trip designed for teachers to learn about the rain forest.

As usual, Boehm's students were never far from her mind.

In buses and on boats, she wrote dozens of postcards, one for every child in her homeroom class that year and the year to come.

She told them about the two-toed sloth, the keel-billed toucan, the blue Morpho butterfly.

Her mission: "To help them look beyond their hometown and realize that we all live on one planet and need to take care of it," she says.

At one point during the trip, Boehm's guide wrapped a vine around the trunk of an enormous ancient tree. Boehm brought the vine back to show her students. She let them stand in a circle and stretch it out, so they could see the size of that tree.

Her interest in the rain forest has caught on at Ryland Heights, where she has taught science for 13 years. Students now raise money to preserve the forests as well as protect endangered sea turtles, whose movements they track by satellite via the Internet.

Through Boehm, 10-year-old Jennifer Rohling knows that she shouldn't buy mahogany wood and that animals like capuchin monkeys shouldn't be taken out of their habitats to become pets or circus acts.

"It's a chain reaction sometimes. If you take out an animal, then another animal doesn't have food, and it might eat something else that would become endangered," Jennifer says.

Introducing the world to kids

Boehm is an expert at making science real to kids, says Barwell, the principal. She gets children actively involved in their own learning.

A recent classroom exercise provided an example.

To show how animals' physical traits are adapted to their environments, Boehm had her students pretend to be hungry creatures. Each child got a plastic fork to represent claws, but the forks had been modified so that some had one tine, some two and some none.

The kids divided into groups at tables with a pile of pretzels in the middle. Their goal: To take turns using their "claws" to see how many pretzels they could extract from the pile.

The children laughed and shouted with excitement.

In the end, Boehm made sure they also got the point: Judging by the pretzel scores, the single-clawed animal clearly had the best adaptation, and therefore would be likeliest to pass on its traits to the next generation.

For Boehm, even giving the instructions for this exercise became an opportunity to stretch students' minds.

"You shouldn't try to eat these pretzels," she reminded them, "because ... why?

"Bacteria," answered Erik Erpenbeck, 9.

"And what is bacteria - producer, decomposer, consumer?"

"Decomposer!" the students shouted.

Just another teaching moment in a classroom that works.

About the school

School: Ryland Heights Elementary School, Kenton County.

Teacher: Annette Boehm.

Subjects taught: Fourth- and fifth-grade science.

Boehm on why the class works: "It can't be just doing fun stuff. It has to be hands-on with a purpose, and they have to be held accountable for what they learned."

Quote: "I like that she talks to us and speaks personally, not sternly. And she doesn't do too many things that make the kids bored," said fifth-grader Jennifer Rohling, 10.

Classrooms that work

This series spotlights a local classroom in which teachers are challenging students in bold, innovative ways. To nominate a class, e-mail bcieslewicz@enquirer.com, fax (513) 768-8340 or write Bill Cieslewicz, Education Editor, The Cincinnati Enquirer, 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202. Please include your name, daytime phone, e-mail and school.

To make a donation to help Ryland Heights students protect the rain forest, call (859) 356-9270.

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E-mail kgutierrez@enquirer.com