Cyrene Slegona’s classroom in Cornish is full of bugs. Bugs on the walls, bugs on the desks, even bugs hanging from the ceiling.

Just don’t expect her to call an exterminator anytime soon.

These aren’t the types of insects that bite or sting. But they have created quite a buzz.

Crafted from wood, glue, paper and plastic, these larger-than-life models are the products of a sixth-grade classroom full of engineers. They move like real insects, they’re in the same scale as real insects, their wings flutter and their mandibles crunch. The only thing they don’t do is disrupt your picnic.

“One of my major reasons for doing insects in the classroom was to remove the fear, because kids learn to be afraid of insects,” said Slegona, who has taught sixth grade at the Cornish Elementary School for seven years. “I build on the interest of the kids. I didn’t know the kids would be so interested in entomology.”

The insects, created by a class two years ago, are only the beginning of the engineering feats in Slegona’s classroom. Her pupils build bridges and catapults and music boxes, combining what they learn in English, math, social studies and science. In building, Slegona says, the pupils learn far more than they could by just reading a book.

“Children need that,” Slegona said. “We need that at any age. We build things, we make things, and in doing this, we learn.”

When she came to this western Maine school district 13 years ago, Slegona, who is originally from Lincolnville, found that her lessons weren’t really sinking in with some of her pupils. Then she had them build bridges out of toothpicks.

“I started to work with some kids and realized I had to get something in their hands,” she said. “Things really started to pull together.”

Since then, Slegona has incorporated building into her curriculum more and more each year. She brings in engineers, professors, college students and scientists. Her pupils make sketches, draft blueprints, do scale drawings, build prototypes, conduct pressure tests and hold “corporate meetings” to discuss design problems. They use terms such as “chassis” and “cotter pin.” They don’t say, “This thingy doesn’t turn.” They say, “My gear mechanism isn’t working.”

“The kids have become natural engineers,” Slegona said. “As preschoolers, these kids are building with blocks. This is just an extension of it. The building reinforces the learning as well as the other things you can do with it.”

Jaime Bouchey, a 12-year-old from Cornish who was in Slegona’s class last year, agrees. Her class, like this year’s class, created music boxes based on the book “Tuck Everlasting” by Natalie Babbitt.

“With the music boxes, we read the book, but this really helped us remember it,” Bouchey said. “If you do a paper, afterward you don’t remember it.”

The building also helped prepare her for middle school.

“In industrial arts, a month or two ago, we had to build something, and I was the only one in that class who knew what I was doing with the different types of materials,” Bouchey said, holding her music box. “You really have to graph things out to build something like this. If you don’t, it won’t come out like you want it.”

Works in progress

During a recent visit with Slegona’s sixth-grade class, it was clear that this year’s crop of young engineers had put a lot of thought into their music boxes. With the tunes of Al Jolson in the background, the pupils worked quietly, asking each other for advice, sculpting statues in clay, measuring dowels and boards, cutting with a jigsaw, drilling holes and gluing together joints. Slegona uses a carpentry kit called the Linx System from Science Source in Waldoboro that has safeguards so that pupils can saw and drill on their own.

If there are problems, Slegona is the pupils’ last resort.

“We ask a classmate in your team, and if the classmate doesn’t know, you ask the teacher,” said Cory Day. Then he stops to compliment another classmate.

“Is that yours, Stoy?” he asks, pointing to Stoy Daye’s music box. “Awesome!”

When the building period is through, the group gets together in a giant circle for their corporate meeting. This is when individual pupils talk about their music boxes and any problems that they’re having. Then, their classmates offer suggestions, usually based on problems that they solved earlier.

“Whose is going to work?” Slegona asks the group before they discuss their projects.

“All of ours!” The class replies.

They then take turns in the spotlight, placing their model in the middle of the circle.

Kayli Whitney is having a problem with her statuette, a model of something important to the pupils, much like those pop-up ballerinas you see in old music boxes. Pieces of her clay turtle keep falling off.

“I’m working something out on my statuette,” Kayli said.

Slegona suggested thinking back to their lesson with the art teacher and planning before they start on their statuettes.

Stoy Daye is next, and he’s having a problem with the gears inside the box, which will make the statuette rotate. When he says the axle is 10 inches long, a group of his classmates correct him, whispering “centimeters, not inches.”

Someone tells Stoy not to glue anything together until he makes sure everything works, but Stoy already has glued it together. Fortunately, with a few adjustments, it will work.

But Evan Ouellette has a bigger problem. His statuette – a bass guitar – is too big for the box.

“Trim it,” says one of his classmates.

“Flip it on its side,” says another.

The consensus is to trim, and the group moves on.

Real-world experience

Pete Mickelson, an engineer from Buxton who has sat in on some of Slegona’s classes, said the students’ corporate meetings are much like those in an engineering firm. Slegona advises, but she doesn’t tell the kids how to solve their problems.

“It’s like bedlam, they have so many questions,” he said. “She’s able to deflect them by telling them, ‘Go answer the questions yourselves.'”

Mickelson said that the class piques the pupils’ interest because they’re dealing with things that are real to them. They aren’t trying to regurgitate esoteric facts. Instead, they’re taking a bunch of often unrelated subjects and bringing them together with their hands.

“One of the hooks for keeping people’s attention during the educational process is to try to make it as real as possible for each kid,” Mickelson said. “Cyrene has done this.”

Arthur Duplessis, whose daughter was in Slegona’s class two years ago, said he’s never seen a teacher quite like her. He, like many other parents, was involved with the class throughout the year.

“It was really fun,” he said. “They were getting their writing in and their math in and a little bit of hands-on experience using tools. Most kids don’t get to do that at all. Why not let them do something they want to do and learn what they need to?”

Slegona’s teaching methods have started to attract attention outside Maine, too. Last year, Slegona won State Farm Insurance’s Good Neighbor Award, with a $5,000 prize to be split between Cornish Elementary School and the University of Kansas Monarch Watch Program. She also received a two-year, $10,000 Tapestry grant from Toyota and the National Science Teachers Association for her “Bugs and Boas” project.

“I would say she represents probably the top 1 percent of teachers nationwide,” said Eric Crossley of the National Science Teachers Association. “People like her are extremely valuable resources. We’re very excited about the project continuing the way it has.”

This year, if all goes as planned, the pupils will work in groups to create insect models. Duplessis plans to come in to help.

In a time when teachers throughout the country face tight budget restraints, Slegona has sought out the money on her own to teach her class the way she wants to teach it. And while she spends some of her spare time writing grants and seeking out funding, she said the rewards are worth it.

“It’s been really important to me to get teachers to realize they don’t have to be limited by a school budget,” Slegona said. “There’s reality, and then there are dreams. If there’s something you really want to do with your students, you can find a way to do it. It’s not easy, but it can be done.”