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Keystone
Weekly This week's Key Points: *Kit Use: Food Chemistry,* *Web Pick of the Week,* *National Chemistry Week,* and *Educator's Night Out,* Kit Use Through a KSN Teacher's Eyes: Food Chemistry (STC) Carolee Waite, a fifth grade teacher in the West Chester Area School District, shares her experiences working with STC's Food Chemistry kit. This kit explores basic concepts related to food and nutrition. Students perform physical and chemical tests to identify the presence of starch, glucose, fats, and proteins in common foods. A colleague introduced Carolee to Food Chemistry at a time when she was looking for a way to stimulate more interest in science among her students. She'd had no previous experience with this kit, but it fit nicely into her curriculum, as they have a unit on chemistry that loosely uses food as the medium of instruction. Although Carolee enjoys teaching the kit, she explains that it's quite time-consuming to prepare all of the packages and packets for use. But after that, it all goes fairly smoothly. The students love it, and she says, "It's one of the more stimulating kits I have seen." Carolee likes to see her students' reactions to the activities, and especially enjoys seeing their excitement and enthusiasm when they see the foods change based on things they did. The kit helped her facilitate the science behind the activities because, as she says, "The kit allowed the children to predict, test, and conclude on their own. We were then able to relate this to concepts we had discussed from the textbook." Carolee is happy to use this kit again and recommends it to others, although she reports that, in covering the main science topics, "more practical extensions would be good."
Web Pick of the
Week Susan Rutland, from the West Chester Area School District, writes to tell that she found a wonderful site for her eighth grade students linked from the ENC website that was a Web Pick of the Week two weeks ago. She says: "I went to spaceKids.com and found so much interesting information. … I especially like AstroLingo and will use that with my average and below average students. They will have fun and learn science vocab at the same time. The tour of the solar system is excellent, and will be useful in my unit on planets." After Susan used the website in class, she reports: "I let them explore different sites at this address before they played the games. There is great info about the sun. The second half of the period I let them play any one of the games and they loved the ones about how old you would be and how much you would weigh if you were on planets other than earth. … The students ask every day to use the computers and visit the 'space sites.'" Dee Wilkinson, also from West Chester, tells us that SpaceWeather.com "has some spectacular pictures of the current aurora displays." If you visit SpaceWeather.com to see the aurora display pictures, you might want to spend a little extra time and look at the neat information they have about solar flares and wind, as well as their other image galleries.
National Chemistry
Week The American Chemical Society wants you to know that November 4-10, 2001 is National Chemistry Week. Thanks to the theme of "Celebrating Chemistry and Art," activities will include events at local art museums, chemical companies that specialize in products necessary to produce works of art, as well as displays in local libraries to illustrate the paper making process, and presentations by speakers on art restoration and preservation. Other events highlighting the theme will include chemical demonstrations, hands-on activities, contests, exhibits, and workshops. Visit http:// webpages.ursinus.edu/vTortorelli/ncw/ to find out about all of the events taking place in the Philadelphia area.
Educator's Night Out
Don't forget that Educator's Night Out is next week! On this special evening, The Franklin Institute opens its doors to educators, free of charge, to showcase its offerings for school groups. At Educator's Night Out, you can:
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| The Franklin Institute gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the National Science Foundation and Unisys Corporation. | |||
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The Franklin Institute is the Demonstration Site for the
Eisenhower
Mid-Atlantic Consortium, providing science and math
resources for teachers.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9819641. © 2003. All rights reserved.
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