It's elementary: Science Buddies bring biology to life.

As a developmental biologist with a passion for teaching, I enjoy explaining my work on cell rearrangements in the yolk sacs of killifish embryos to audiences ranging from first-year undergraduates to professional colleagues. Becoming a parent offered new opportunities. When my daughter entered our local elementary school, I wanted to find a way to share my professional life with her teachers. My modest desire to lend a helping hand evolved into a ‘‘Science Buddies’’ program, where undergraduate science majors are matched with elementary classrooms. Conceived as a way to help enrich the local science curriculum, the program has served as a training ground for young science educators, opening the eyes of college students to the joys and challenges of primary school teaching. Volunteering in the school started with an offer to bring in animals from my marine aquaria. I packed up a ‘‘Tupperware tidepool,’’ spread newspaper on the second-grade classroom floor, and passed around sea urchins and horseshoe crabs. The kids were most interested in the basics—Are they poisonous? Where did I get them? Do horseshoe crabs taste good? My visits soon expanded beyond my daughter’s class, as other teachers stopped me in the halls or sent e-mails, asking if I could bring something to their classrooms, too. One hardy sea cucumber entertained dozens of seven-year-olds and forged a link that brought my expertise to new audiences. Once I had established myself as a local scientist who loved being in the school, I was asked to be the parent liaison for a program that supplies elementary classrooms with chilled aquaria and salmon embryos for the students to hatch and rear. After four months of stewardship, the larvae are released in watershed habitats as part of an attempt to reestablish local populations. I showed time-lapse video sequences of early fish development to the fourth-grade classes, explained how a spherical egg is transformed into a small fish-on-a-ball-of-yolk, and led discussions about the salmon life cycle. When the elementary school purchased a dissecting microscope, video camera, and monitor, the microscopy cart mostly sat in the supply closet gathering dust— not because the teachers lacked the interest in the new equipment, but because they lacked the time. During a sabbatical, I made myself available to the teachers as a microscopy tech, bringing the setup into classrooms to look at whatever the class was studying—caterpillars, rocks, flower parts, etc. This was an excellent way to meet other teachers and be introduced to the science curriculum in the different grades. We expanded the salmon project by looking at the larvae under the microscope, and I brought in zebrafish embryos so the students could see much earlier stages of fish development. The first time the students saw a beating heart and blood flowing through the yolk sac of the transparent zebrafish embryos they were awestruck. They looked at the veins on the inner side of their wrists, felt their own heartbeat, and made connections between what they saw under the microscope to their own circulatory system. To ensure that these hands-on lessons would continue after my sabbatical ended, I started Science Buddies in 2005. I asked for volunteers among my undergraduate students and had them fill out a written application, looking for talented students who also had experience working with