 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Little ones get big lesson in chemistry
By PAULETTE LASH RITCHIE © St. Petersburg Times, published November 16, 2000
Kevin Bingham is the chemistry teacher at Citrus High School. Michelle Bingham is a prekindergarten teacher at Inverness Primary School. Their son, Benjamin, is in Michelle Bingham's class. Recently, though, Benjamin spent some time in his father's classroom doing chemistry experiments right along with the high school kids. "It evolved at home," Kevin Bingham said, "because our little boy is in her class. They were trying to learn their colors and I said, "why don't we do one of the experiments I do to help them learn their colors?' " And so Michelle Bingham, prekindergarten teacher Chris Algeo and teacher's assistants Sheila Chau and Janice Rynolds took the children to Kevin Bingham's chemistry II class. He teamed his students with the little ones to separate black ink on filter paper into its colors using a solvent. "For them (the prekindergarten children) the lesson was on color recognition in a scientific setting," Kevin Bingham said. "This was an experiment they (the high school students) had already done in chemistry I, and I asked them if they would be willing to be mentors to these little kids." The children also decorated T-shirts with colored markers and then draped them over pans and poured solvent over them to see the colors spread. Their shirts were kaleidoscopes, Kevin Bingham said. He instructed his students to give the get prekindergarteners as much ownership of the experiment as they could. "I hoped that it would open them to the idea of teaching as a career, and in science in particular," Kevin Bingham said. "And, in the end, they appreciated more what I do for a living and what my wife does." The following week, Kevin Bingham again opened his classroom to elementary school students. This time, though, they came during his planning period and he was the teacher. The children were from Kristen Russell's first/second grade combo class, where Bingham's daughter, Savannah, is a student. The children saw some basic scientific principles in action. He tied one demonstration to photosynthesis, a topic the children had been studying, when he showed them something used in horticulture he called a ghost crystal. The crystal looked like a little piece of dried up glue, but, when it was put into water, it absorbed so much that it took on the appearance of water, reflecting light the same way. It seemed to disappear. Peering into the water of the flask, the children saw what appeared to be a string tied around nothing. Bingham said the lesson was on light and how some special effects are done in movies. The children were really wowed when Bingham set soap bubbles on fire, causing a flame to flash nearly up to the ceiling, only to dissipate almost immediately. He also pumped a gas into a hollow egg until it exploded. The students participated in a demonstration which illustrated Bernoulli's Principle (air flows like a liquid). Some of them tried to pop a pingpong ball out of a glass funnel by blowing into the stem of the funnel. Huffing or puffing, they could not budge the ball. It would twirl around, but would not go out. The air, Bingham explained, like liquid, moved up the sides of the funnel rather than right up through the middle, which would have pushed the ball out. The students were impressed by the difficulty of the demonstrations they were allowed to try. "That was hard stuff to do," said 6-year-old Jacob Bart. "I learned that it's hard to blow that golf ball up," said Nathan Damron, 8. He was just as impressed with Kevin Bingham. "I learned that he's a good scientist," Nathan said.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
Citrus Times |
