Who says science can’t be fun?

With a little help from high school

students, Weston School makes learning fun
By:Mary Ellen Zangara
   Weston Elementary School held its annual Math and Science Day on Feb. 21, getting a hand with hands-on interactive science and math activities from some high school students and parents.
   The day offers each class chances to learn about various subjects, such as the five senses, magnetic pull, density, and nutrition by visiting different rooms set up with experiments exploring the subjects. Students travel from room to room to study, build, play or create an experiment.
   For example, kindergarten students spent the morning learning about the five senses. Five classrooms were set up for the lessons, each with a different sense.
   In one room, they tasted different foods such as pretzels for salty, pickles and sour skittles for sour, chocolate kisses for sweet and salsa for spicy.
   In the first-grade classrooms, the students had hands-on activities that focused on bubble science, levers and graphing.
   For the bubble experiments, the students used soap and water to blow big bubbles with the huge wands. Like good scientists, they recorded their observations in a "bubble journal" to keep track of their results.
   A lesson on simple machines included trying to lift a student using a level, and in another classroom, the first-graders learned about separating colors by using black and green filters to see the changes.
   One of the favorite class activities involved using M&M’s to study graphs and classifying methods. At this class, students learning about predictions, classifying, graphing and comparing data. They got to use an individual bag of the popular candies for their counting project.
   First-graders needed to predict how many M&M’s and what colors they thought were in their bag of candies. After they did their predictions, they were instructed to open their bag, count the M&M’s — but not to eat them. They listed the different colors in their bags and how many of each color there were.
   The results were graphed using bar graphs. For comparing data, students compared with others in their group to see the different results among them.
   Best of all, at the end, they got to eat their M&Ms.
   Second-graders learned about scientific methods by making root beer floats. They followed the five steps of the scientific method by asking a question, coming up with a hypothesis, doing an experiment, recording their data and drawing a conclusion.
   Another classroom got to be quite a mess. Students learned how to make "Ooblek," the gooey material from Dr. Seuss books. The substance seemed to be a lot of fun for the students to make and stick their hands in.
   Students tested their theories on what materials would float in another activity, testing seven items — such as a button, a golf ball, a rubber band and a penny.
   The third-graders’ experiments focused on rain forests and the environment, learning about forests, animals and rain forests around the world.
   The afternoon session was dedicated to math challenges, with each grade level choosing four students from each class to compete against one another.
   Laura Landau, a first-grade teacher and one of the coordinators of the project, was pleased with the success of the day.
   "The smiles on the children’s faces were the first sign of a successful day," Ms. Landau said.
   "A special thanks to the parents at Weston School and the Manville High School students who also contributed to the success of this day," she added. "These volunteers were responsible for implementing the teacher-made activity by introducing the topic. A hands-on activity followed the introduction and concluded with a summary of what each child learned. The building was alive with science."
   Ms. Landau also wanted to thank teachers Theresa Higgins, Shani Arnette and Dawn Cosenza who worked with her to make this day successful. Now that the day is over the students and teachers will begin to prepare for their next annual Science and Math Day.