Heroes of History: Helen Martini, Zookeeper

 

BOOK: 

In "Cubs In The Tub" by Candace Fleming,  Helen Martini takes care of tiger cubs that her husband brings home. She cares for them as they grow and when officials come to collect them, Helen goes to the zoo with them. She became the first ever female zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. I really wanted to read this book and because Helen Martini is an obsure person, this was more of a zookeeper storytime.

In addition to this one, we also read "Pierre the Penguin" by Jean Marzollo.

It is a very short, rhyming book about a penguin who loses his feathers and the zookeeper who finds a way to help grow them back.

Songs:

You Can Hear The Lions Roaring At The Zoo (tune: If You're Happy and You Know It)

You can hear the lions roaring at the zoo, ROAR! ROAR!

You can hear the lions roaring at the zoo, ROAR! ROAR!

You can hear the lions roaring, you can hear the lions roaring

You can hear the lions roaring at the zoo, ROAR! ROAR!

(elephants trumpeting, eagles screeching, monkeys eeking) 

and then because we read a book about penguins....

Did You Ever See a Penguin Come To Tea.

This is a really cute song about a penguin coming to tea party and then making fun motions. Click here for a run-down of this song. 

Activity: What animal is the most dangerous? 

Using a small list of the 10 most dangerous creatures, found on Science Focus, we played a quick guessing game of what animals were the most dangerous. 

We also flipped through our Life-Size Zoo books to see how some different animals compared to each other in size. Because it's a small group that comes to this program, we can sit in a circle in the floor and flip through books like this. 

 Activity: Pretend Zookeepers

Here and there, we kept discussing tasks of zookeepers and at the end we pretended to be zookeepers. Using our puppets, I set up 5 cages, copying the idea found here. Each deputized zookeeper was given a clipboard with a form to fill out about whichever animal they wanted.

Then of course, each cage had a informational sign posted next to it. 

Here are my signs. Unfortunately, no pictures of the set-up.

Facts come from Zookeepers by Tony Hyland.