At Discovery Days, bus loads of kids from local schools came to the LaSells Stewart Center. Our students had set up stations with light probes, temperature probes, and pinhole cameras.
The following list is composed of points that the students made upon asking to reflect on their experience at Discovery Days:
Different ages brought different understanding. The little ones wanted to play, the older kids wanted to understand what was going on.
If you ask the kids if they ever had their temperature taken they would say no, but if you ask if they have had a theremometer in their mouth they would say yes.
If the kids ask why and you try and explain it they lose interest because they don't understand.
We were able to get the teachers' attention, share with them how to repeat experiments in the classroom.
It was difficult to explain what was going on to the younger kids. The older kids understood hot and cold.
At the temperature station, the younger kids were easier to talk to.
The younger kids just wanted to play with the probes.
The older kids were able to explain what material will be more reflective.
With the light sensors, the older kids wanted to try different things to make different graphs, the younger kids just wanted to play and didn't care about the graphs.
It was funny to see the kids who really understood something and how curious they were.
It was difficult to keep up with all the “whys” from the little kids.
It was a challenge to explain something without the kids running off out of disinterest.
One kid was interested in the reflective material, he wanted to learn more by crumpling up the paper to see if it was more reflective.
It would have been nicer if there was more time.
It was nice to see what we do in this class can really be used with little kids.
It was nice to use the vocabulary from this class, it was nice that I was able to tweak my vocabulary based on the age of the children in the group.