Feeling Crabby?

PHOTOS BY JULIE WIATT

The entire fourth grade of Pine Crest Elementary School spent the whole day with crabs on "Crabby Day," October 24, as the culminating project of a unit studying the Chesapeake. Students wrote poems, cooked and ate crabcakes, dissected crabs, and studied pollution.

Cooking up some crabcakes was a good way for students to internalize their lesson. Even first-time crabcake eaters seemed to enjoy the results. Naqwan (center) declared them "better than I don't know what—better than spaghetti, better than cookies, better than chocolate," although Abigail (left), who declared them delicious, still maintained, "nothing's better than chocolate."

Science teacher Ms. Charlotte Croft oversaw the dissection, with dramatics enactments of claws and eyestalks. Croft thought crabby day up—"even though I'm a vegetarian"—when she was teaching a class about the Chesapeake and a child asked what crabs looked like.

"I knew we had to do this." The first year, Crabby Day was an event only in her homeroom. Last year the whole 4th grade participated. This is the art of teaching," said the animated young teacher. "I'd teach like this every day if I could.