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PART 7:
So now Bob is going to tell you more about actually doing an implementation of this in
a school.
Bob: So Pat’s got all these concepts and these ideas and such, because he’s a scientist
obviously. He also has kids, and he was the science dad at the school. And I thought,
oh, that is so cool. That’s wonderful to be able to have a scientist to be the person
who’s helping out and volunteering at the elementary school. When I heard the kinds
of things he was doing, I was saying, “That is awesome!” I would love to have those
things in my school to be able to have kids interact with. So we got talking. He said,
“Well, I could probably get some of those for you.” We decided that that would be
a really incredible thing to have available for aschool, building-wide. For me, I wanted
to have these things available so kids start getting excited and interested and talking
about science. The concepts are incredible. They are high-level concepts. But there are
elements of them that start from the very beginnings of elementary school with the interest
in these different things. Interested in rainbows, interested in how you measure things, interested
in baseball. So what we decided to do is put together a display area, much like what we
have over there. We put this in line on the way to the cafeterias, so that as the kids
go past every single day, they get a chance to look at it. And we would have the poster
up for a couple of weeks. We would start off by…we would have a setup there where there’s
a box, pencils, everything that they needed right there. We would tell them that they
could work together if they wanted to, they could work with kids from different grade
levels if they wanted to. They could come back later, during recess and explore it a
little bit more if they want. The whole idea was to share information and be talking about
whatever poster was up there for that two-, three-, four-week period. I would do announcements.
“Hey, we’ve got a contest going on! Let’s see who can get these things turned in. We
want to have people find out about science. Stop for science. Get excited about it!”
And the way that we would run it is that when these forms were turned in, anyone who got
the question right would be put into a drawing. And then the drawing, you would get your name
announced in the announcements, come down and get a science pencil or something like
that, and then, over time, what would happen is that, obviously kids get excited about
it, they start working in groups, looking at the different things, talking about it,
exploring. And then we would then take all of those whose names were randomly selected
and put them in another drawing so that there’d be a couple of big prizes that would be like
science games or kits or something like that. So we’re generating a buzz around school
about science and howexciting it is. You should Stop for science. The next poster’s going
to be up next month. It’s about this particular concept. So that to me is the important part
for school-wide. You can have this go on in the school without any specific teacher deciding
to do it in their classroom. You could do it school-wide. There are a lot of options
and opportunities though, for classrooms to have the kinds of discussions like Pat was
having. And that’s a very powerful component of it too. For instance, it can be supplemental.
This is not something to replace science programs, obviously. But it is supplemental. It does
help to add to the things that are going on in the classrooms. Some schools have science
clubs. Great opportunity for a science club, after school, work on this poster, get some
research going, find out some more information, really analyze what’s going on with these
particular topics. Connecting to non-science classes: we’ve had teachers of course, these
have high levels of reading abilities in some cases, so there’s all different levels and
ways that you can connect it to other classes. Math is an incredible component of these too.
So this isn’t just a science thing. It involves all of the aspects of the classroom. Parents:
We’ve had a lot of parents who’ve stopped after school and hear about what the science
poster was, so they wanted to see it when they stopped and picked up the kids after
school or for daycare, they stopped and looked at the posters. Other ideas that you might
have: I’m sure there’s a ton of different ideas of how these can be used. It doesn’t
even have to be in a school. It could be in a YMCA or scout groups or something like that.
So it’s anywhere that the public could stop and have kids or people talking about these
particular concepts.