What a crazy week in Science Giants! We started teaching our lessons to the Channing’s Childcare students at By the Hand. The week started off with teaching the boys and the Science Giants were shocked at how much energy those little boys had! “How do they still have so much energy!?!” exclaimed Alize after the first day. But even with all that energy, the Science Giants were able to keep the students engaged and participating in their lessons. They taught them about kinetic energy and energy transfers through dropping balls and measuring the difference between the different types of balls. They also made boats the first day with up-cycled materials and learned what materials floated better and held the most weight. “I was most surprised that they were so excited about the boat competition!” said Luwam. Going into the second day with just the girls, all of the students agreed that they thought it would be challenging to get the girls excited to play the running around games. To their surprise the girls were maybe even more enthusiastic about sharks and minnows than the boys were. Their biggest challenge teaching the girls came with how chatty the little girls were. They were so excited about everything they were learning they would not stop talking about it! Alize and Chantiera thought quickly on their feet and pulled out a ball from the day before and called it the “talking ball,” whoever was holding the ball was allowed to speak. The boys in the class were at first a little overwhelmed by the little girls, but as the day wore on they all got more comfortable with each other and by the end they were joking and laughing all together.

On Wednesday, the Science Giants biggest challenge to date came along, all 19 students together. “I finally understand how hard it is to be a teacher!” said Dontay, and Keith and Luwam both agreed with him. They ran into some difficulties with their static electricity experiment, it was way too humid outside so it did not work as intended. They quickly had to switch gears to play a game to distract the kids while they switched gears to their air resistance activity, where the students had to create a parachute to save an egg. What has impressed me most about the Science Giants is how easily they work together to make quick decisions and take action. They are an incredibly smart and easy-going group of students and everything has been running seamlessly even when issues arise!

Thursday was our trip to the Museum of Science and Industry! The students had such a great time playing with all of the interactive exhibits at the Museum. They learned about storms, and the physics behind earthquakes. We even got to go into the new Brick By Brick exhibit and play with all of the Legos in that exhibit. DeSean got so excited when we walked into the exhibit and there were Legos EVERYWHERE. “This is AMAZING!!” he yelled! The Museum was an awesome end to our physics lesson week. I only wish we could have spent the whole day at the museum; we were having such a great time it was hard to leave. So far the teaching aspect of this summer’s Science Giants program is going better than I could have ever hoped! I am so excited to keep watching these students work with the kids and learn even more from each other!

 

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