Blending art and science

Thanks to funds from an anonymous donor, students at TeWinkle can learn about science in innovative ways.Wednesday afternoon at TeWinkle Middle School, students made sand-and-glue paintings of reptiles and amphibians. Nothing surprising there. Starting with black-and-white patterns, the sixth- through eighth-graders dabbed glue on parts of the page, then poured different colors of sand over them to create eyes, scales and other body parts.

It was an art project, but also a scientific one. The students in Pamela Finamore’s Nature Academy had visited the San Diego Wild Animal Park the previous week, and now they were illustrating the creatures they had seen up close: lizards, frogs, snakes and turtles.

“These are the kids who find an interest in science and just want to pursue it a little more,” said Finamore, who founded the Nature Academy and has been its advisor for eight years.

The academy, which includes about 40 students, is supported by an anonymous donor who wanted to give Westside children better opportunities to learn science. The donor, Finamore said, provides the Newport-Mesa Schools Foundation with $30,000 a year -- money that goes to transportation, ticket prices, supplies and more.

Every Wednesday, the academy meets in Finamore’s room to do an activity, hear a guest presenter or plan a trip. Besides the Wild Animal Park, the class has also ventured this year to the Environmental Nature Center in Newport Beach and plans excursions to UC Irvine’s observatory and the tide pools at Dana Point.

On campus at TeWinkle, the club works on crafts and also picks up trash from the commons. Eighth-grader Hayley Delgado, 13, said she and her classmates recently did a “trash scavenger hunt” in which participants searched for paper scraps, bottle caps and more. Afterward, the class turned the trash into collages and hung them on the wall.

Being in the Nature Academy, Hayley said, has made her more environmentally conscious than before.

“I’ve always recycled,” she said. “The thing that’s changed is picking up trash that I see lying on the floor. You think some animal is going to try to eat it.”

Other students in the class said they had little interest in the outdoors before joining this September.

“I wanted to get in touch with nature, because I hadn’t been outside in a while,” said eighth-grader Gracie Brestel, 13. “I haven’t been out camping.”

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot education writer Michael Miller visits a campus in the Newport-Mesa area and writes about his experience.

20051206ir1r21knDOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / DAILY PILOT(LA)Breann Parasson, left, spreads colored sand on her drawing of a frog during the Nature Academy, an after-school program at TeWinkle Middle School.