The Science & Discovery Center (SDC) mobile classroom visits fourth grade classrooms in the District twice each year, in part to help ready these students for NYS Science testing. According to Smith Elementary Schools Cindy Watson, her fourth grade students enjoyed the first visit, which featured experiments on density and buoyancy. It was interesting, hands-on and my students were engaged and excited, she says. The lab will be here again with a lab on electromagnetism featuring instructor Bruce McClarin. This fits nicely into our fourth grade Science curriculum.
The partnership with the Science and Discovery Center is not just limited to school hours. The SDC has hosted six Family Science Nights at Severn, Gregg, Kent Phillips, Smith, Erwin Valley and Carder Elementary Schools this year and Winfield Street and Lindley-Presho schools last year, made possible by a grant from the TI-GER Foundation secured by the SDC. Activities for these fun-filled, educational evenings include building circuits or constructing a tower made of golf balls or experimenting with optical fiber or mixing borax and glue to make a goopy polymer as well as a number of other hands-on discoveries in the making. Family Science Night programs bring together families, often three generations, who come to the schools to participate together, professional science educators who plan and lead the programs, volunteers from the science and education community, programs that correlate with NYS curriculum standards, and materials and supplies for demonstrations and experiments.
Parents seem to love this program, which increases their comfort level when working with their students on Science projects at home, says SDC Executive Director Patricia Dann. Family Science Nights give parents the opportunity to discover how they can promote math and science at home by simply using inexpensive household products for science experiments and demonstrations. Over 700 participants have attended these family events in the past year.
