Chin-chillin' in the classroom

By Pennie Embry, Staff Writer

STIGLER, Sept. 24 — Not every small boy gets to be teacher and teacher’s pet all in the same day.

But last Thursday, short, grey-haired and slightly shy Chinchy-Fluff Bond did just that. Of course, it might help to know that Chinchy-Fluff is not a human boy, but a boy chinchilla residing with a local Stigler family.

“We started out with an ‘Ag’ day,” said Trish Gamblin, a math, reading and English teacher at Stigler Middle School. “One of my students, Jessie Bond, said she had a chinchilla at home. We wanted to study an animal that could be brought into the classroom, so we decided to study chinchillas.”

A group of Gamblin’s students studied chinchillas for a whole week –– where they come from, what they eat, and all sorts of other chinchilla facts and figures. Then, last Thursday, 13-year-old Jessie brought the family chinchilla to the school’s resource room for a visit and to help her fellow students learn firsthand about the silky rodents from South America.

Jessie’s sister, Daley Goode, and her mother, Trish Bond, came along to help with the afternoon lesson. Trish explained to the group of middle-school students circled around Chinchy’s cage that all the pet chinchillas in the United States descend from 11 chinchillas brought to America from the Andes Mountains in the 1920s. Then Jessie and Trish discussed Chinchy’s diet –– what he could eat (chinchilla food and a fruit and nut mix) what he loved (cashews) and what he hated (the alfalfa pellets in his feed, which he would rather throw at the family dachshund than eat.) He also chews on sticks, like a beaver, to keep his ever-growing teeth worn down.

Jessie and Trish then talked about the costs of owning, feeding, housing and bathing a chinchilla, and Gamblin had her student’s calculate some of those costs as part of a math exercise.

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