Provencal Junior High sixth grader students in Mrs. Deanna Elkins’ ELA classes recently raised $380 to symbolically adopt three tigers through the World Wildlife Fund.
Their project organically grew from working on a research simulation task on the impact zoos have on animals. The article they read was “The Stripes will Survive” by Jaqueline Adams (2004). The article focused on saving Siberian (Amur) tigers from extinction through the Species Survival Plan. Because the article was almost 20 years old, the students researched whether the tiger population had increased and discovered that in 2022 the number of Amur tigers living in the wild was approximately 350-450, about the same as in 2004. Their research about the lack of growth in the tiger population continued and the students received 27 informative responses from zoos and organizations in 18 states and 3 foreign countries.
