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EDUCATION
In School Residency
A cumulative program that engages elementary students in hands-on, NGSS-aligned lessons exploring birds, ecosystems, and environmental conservation.
Our 7-10-week in-school residencies provide structured, connected learning that builds students’ knowledge and skills over time. Led by a certified educator, each session features bioartifacts, sensory activities, and hands-on investigations that support your science curriculum and NGSS learning goals. Explore residency options by grade level below.
Residencies
Booking Snapshot
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Format: Weekly, recurring series
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Fee: Contact for Pricing
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Group size: Up to 25 students
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Setting: Classroom-based; outdoors
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Grades served: 3-5
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Booking: Contact us at gabby@cibirdsanctuary.org
Birds on the Block
Grades 3 - 5
Urban birding turns your schoolyard into a live science lab. Students build core observation and data collection skills, then apply them across three schoolyard field days focused on appearance, song, and behavior. By the final session, students have built their own dataset, identified local species, and developed conservation solutions they can apply in their own neighborhoods.
Adaptations: Built to Survive
Grades 3 - 5
Students explore how a bird's body is built for the life it leads, through hands-on examination of real bioartifacts: feet, wings, beaks, and sensory adaptations. Working from a running comparison log built session by session, students finish by designing their own bird suited to an assigned habitat, justifying every adaptation with specimen evidence.
Ecosystems: Food Web Investigators
Grades 3 - 5
Students investigate how living things in their own schoolyard depend on one another. They survey producers, insects, birds, and decomposers in turn, collecting real field data at each level, before building a food web model that shows how matter and energy move through the ecosystem they've observed firsthand.
Threats to Birds: Detectives & Advocates
Grades 3 - 5
Students investigate the real pressures facing NYC birds, like habitat loss, window collisions, cats and pollution, and climate change, collecting their own field evidence for each. Working in teams, they adopt one threat, build a case using their own data, and propose a solution they can act on in their own neighborhood.
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Prerequisite: Birds on the Block
Next Generation Science Standards
Our residencies are aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a set of K–12 science content standards that outline what students should know and be able to do at key points in their academic journey. Developed by states to strengthen science education, the NGSS are research-based and reflect the most current understanding of how students learn science best.