Kids learn from moon rocks at Princeton Charter School
By: Jeff Milgram
Mark Schlawin carries an aluminum case into the classroom at the Princeton Charter School.
The security procedures for the case are stringent.
Every morning at 8:15, Mr. Schlawin goes to the Summit Bank branch on Nassau Street and signs the case out of the vault. The case must either be in Mr. Schlawin’s possession, or in the same room as he is. After class, Mr. Schlawin returns the case to the vault.
What does Mr. Schlawin have inside that case? The Hope Diamond? The codes to America’s nuclear missiles?
Well, not exactly. But what’s in the case is priceless, illegal for a private individual to own and simply out of this world.
Inside the case are moon rocks and meteorites, and Mr. Schlawin began using them last week to teach science to children as young as first-graders.
"You sort of think of moon rocks as dusty white rocks," Mr. Schlawin said. They are not. Some samples are orange, others are gray.
Six small samples of moon rocks are encased in a 6-inch diameter Lucite disc. Six meteorite samples are treated in the same way.
The discs are placed in cloth to minimize the chance of scratches.
The rocks are owned by NASA, which runs an education resource center at Georgian Court College in Lakewood. Mr. Schlawin attended a one-day training program in order to be permitted to use the moon rocks in class -something he will do through this week.
Mr. Schlawin has integrated the moon rocks into his curriculum.
"It’d be a shame not to show it to every class," he said.
The first-graders are "tremendously enthusiastic" about working with the moon rocks, he said. The sixth-graders use the rocks in an astronomy segment of their science class, and the seventh-graders use the samples as a way to learn about light and sound, he said.
Last week, Mr. Schlawin used the moon rocks in a seventh-grade observation lab, giving the students a chance to draw and write descriptions of them.
The students looked closely at the moon rocks.
"It’s weird but interesting," said Robby Meyners.
A sample marked "Highland Soil" is "powdery, gray with specks," according to Sauhard Sahi, while Mathias Goldstein thought it "looks like glitter."
The moon rocks are priceless because they cannot be replaced. There are only about 880 pounds of moon rocks down here on earth, Mr. Schlawin said.