Opening a portal to summer
“I think I found a skull,” said Abigail Forrest, proudly holding up a dark green, furry blob with her tweezers for the others to inspect. She leaned in to note some eye sockets and what appeared to be two small, snaggly teeth. “It smells weird.” Her friend and lab partner, Kennedy O’Neil, put down her scalpel and squinted through her plastic safety goggles to take a closer look. “That’s definitely a chipmunk,” she said, “or a bunny rabbit.” The two third-graders were spending a sunny July afternoon gleefully carving up undigested food particles coughed up by an owl as part of a summer mentoring session in science at the Harvard Allston Education Portal. The mentoring program pairs Harvard undergraduate students with schoolchildren from Boston’s Allston-Brighton neighborhood to help find new ways to engage kids in math, science, and writing, often using an interdisciplinary approach. Established in 2008, the Ed Portal connects more than 1,700 Allston-Brighton...