Schools

Big bubbles, smelly cheese and scientific hypotheses

Teachers' innovative ideas make an after-school program at Cypress Elementary School the place to be.

By Michele Miller, Times Staff Writer
Published March 5, 2008

Teacher Mary Ann Robinson, from left, Parker Engh, Hunter Engh and Halina Binder watch as Victoria Sass carefully balances a large bubble during Cypress Elementary's after-school science club. The six-week club for is funded by a grant provided through the Pasco County Education Foundation.
	[Brendan Fitterer | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Brendan Fitterer | Times] Lauren Aitken reacts to a bubble demonstration by her teachers during Cypress Elementary's after-school science club.

NEW PORT RICHEY

Stinky cheese, bouncing eggs, dancing raisins and bubbles. - All, it turns out, can be the makings of something scientific. - Say, for instance, you take a hard-boiled egg and soak it in white vinegar for a couple of days. Will it bounce? What will happen to the shell? Maybe you want to make a hypothesis about those things, then find the answers by trying them out.

Dancing raisins? See for yourself by dropping a few in separate cups of soda pop and water. And you just might learn something about density.

How to make stinky cheese - and why would anyone want to do that? Mix a little sodium, enzyme and powdered milk, then take it home and put it in your fridge for three weeks and you get an idea about how fermentation works.

As for the bubbles, those can be done easily with a little dish-washing detergent and water. You can make some pretty cool observations, too, by blowing through three dimensional blowers - maybe a triangle or a cube. Then there are the "explosive" kind made when you combine baking soda, vinegar and water in a plastic bag.

For six weeks, 28 Cypress Elementary students got to try out those experiments and more as part of a free after-school science program.

That's thanks to a $300 teaching grant from the Pasco County Education Foundation Inc., two enthusiastic teachers willing to put in some extra time and effort, and a spark from parent, volunteer and School Advisory Board member Pam Binder.

During the past school year, Binder saw the need for after-school enhancement programs like the kind her children had attended when they lived in Maryland. She brought her idea before the School Advisory Council for consideration.

They told her to go for it.

Binder then surveyed parents and discovered there was a desire. After much research Binder interviewed and got approval for three outside vendors to come to Cypress and offer six-week-long after-school programs in Spanish, art and science at costs ranging from $45 to $110 per student.

After successfully launching the well-attended programs, it turns out there was a hitch.

There were county-mandated facility and utility fees the school was supposed to charge outside for-profit vendors. Applying those fees to the cost of tuition was prohibitive for students, Binder said. The outside vendors couldn't absorb the fees and make a profit, so all three declined to offer the programs for a second session.

"The need is there," Binder said. "I just think there's got to be a way to do it and make them (enhancement programs) reasonable."

Enter Mary Ann Robinson and Jenn Scherer, two Cypress teachers with a passion for science. This year the two wrote a proposal and received a grant from the Pasco Education Foundation that would completely fund an after-school science program for 28 students.

Some 60 students applied for the program, Scherer said. "So we had to pull names out of a hat."

Lucky kids.

Such as Victoria Sass, 8. "We do a lot of stuff in class but it wasn't fun like this," Victoria said. "This was very fun because we got to mix stuff mostly by ourselves - but first we had to be taught."

Two brothers, Parker and Hunter Engh, also lucked out.

"I thought it was very good and educational," said Parker, 7.

"I liked it because you got to do stuff - lots of experiments," said Hunter, 9.

"And you get to learn stuff that you never knew," piped in Gavin Gruwell, 8.

That was a sentiment shared by both teachers.

"We learned through the whole experience," said Scherer, noting that each experiment had to be researched for fun as well as educational purposes and tried out at the teachers' homes before being brought before the students.

The lessons from the after-school Science Club also turned out to be far-reaching.

Robinson and Scherer said they each adapted some of the experiments for the students in their own classrooms.

"I think it made us better teachers," Scherer said."

Robinson noted that students in the club seemed especially hyped for the upcoming school Science Fair. "It sparked some enthusiasm for other projects."

And maybe, just maybe a spark like that will keep the after-school enhancement programs at Cypress alive.

"The hope is that they would fund something like this again," Scherer said, adding that she'd like to see other teachers step up and perhaps offer similar programs in art or another foreign language.

Binder, who volunteered with some of the program's cleanup duties, heartily agrees.

"But I don't think we can lay it all on the school," she said. "These two teachers, who were fabulous, applied for a grant and got the program running. But teachers are overworked as it is and we had to limit (the number) of students."

Even so, Binder said: "This was a high quality program. These teachers put it together on their own and did a fantastic job. I think it was an amazing learning experience."

To learn more

For information on the Pasco County Education Foundation, go to the Web site www.pascoeducationfoundation.org.

[Last modified March 4, 2008, 20:49:23]