I envisioned the project as lasting the entire school year. I had never attempted a year-long theme before, and wanted to see how it would work. I believe it gave the children a clarity of purpose and achievement that's rare in our classes when we whip through one curriculum after another, and all wonder what it was we just finished learning about as soon as we're "through." I feel that by sending a year studying birds, there was a sense that you're never "through" learning about something.

The childrens' questions might come up anytime during the day. We would post them only during the two times listed above during the school day. What I hadn't planned on was that the answers came to us anytime, announced with a beep that began to make the kids remind me of Pavlov's dogs. They'd call out excitedly, "We got mail!" with every beep, and soon they had thought up the new class job of Computer Expert. This person got to go check the beep, fetch the new mail (we were using Pop mail), choose to print out a hard copy to share and keep in our binder, and go to the office to get the printed mail. This continues to be a popular job in our class! It was a new experience for me to have these little interruptions throughout the day that meant other people were thinking about us; birds were part of the entire day, not limited to an isolated science period.

The next lesson for us all in this adventure was to evaluate the answers we got. We were blessed with mostly very informed, patient and skillful correspondents who seemed to enjoy writing to us as much as we enjoyed receiving their answers to our questions. These people treated the children with the respect you'd appreciate from a scientific colleague involved in true research. Over and over again, the children were given the reward of a comment about their "good" or "interesting" questions. They were also given the honor of long, thoughtful and information-rich replies. My favorites invited the children to share their own theories on subjects they had posed questions about. They were also told that they'd convinced a teacher of older students that people their (young) age could be "inquisitive and interesting."

The children learned, and I was reminded, how alive and challenging information truly is. Some questions were never fully answered, though pursued for weeks or months, and proved the more compelling for their lack of closure. New questions would arise from a well-worded reply. The children learned that the very same question could get very different answers from different people. In one case, two children evaluated replies that didn't give the information they had wanted, and had two very different solutions. One child chose to write back to the same person and explain her frustration with the general answer she'd gotten, and the other child chose to let another child send the question to another person instead. Both got satisfactory answers the second time.