Having a Blast at the NAEYC 2008 Conference

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If you attended the annual NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) conference last week in Dallas, Texas, it wasn’t hard to find the Steve Spangler Science booth. All you had to do was listen for the shouts of surprise as we launched over 600 Mentos Geysers with the Geyser Tube™ in our own take on the classic dunk tank… the Boy in a Box. It was great to see the teacher reactions when they pulled the string and sent a blast of Coke raining down on our never-tiring Boys in a Box.

As my team can attest, I lost my voice at the conference… just like I do every year… from explaining to everyone who passed by the science behind the Mentos and Diet Coke reaction.  It’s important as educators that we don’t just drop some Mentos in a Coke and call it science.  The resulting geyser is a great effect, but you are missing the key piece of the lesson.  Shoot off a geyser, then listen as your students start to ask questions… “Why does that happen?”…  “What if we used more Mentos?”…

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Teachers Should Not Have to Lie

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I overheard a group of teachers on the elevator this afternoon talking about calling in “sick” in order to attend this amazing conference (NAEYC 2004 - see previous blog entries). Why? Because their school administrators don’t support this type of continuing education. And we wonder why our education system is failing! How is a teacher supposed to learn new teaching strategies and techniques without surrounding him or herself with other professionals who are experts in their field? In other words, teachers need to attend conference and professional development seminars just as doctors, lawyers and other professionals do. Let me go out on a limb here and guess that your doctor, dentist or lawyer doesn’t have to lie to anyone in order to attend a conference. Professionals don’t have to lie to further their education in order to better serve their clients. Hmmm? Maybe we might want to start treating teachers like professionals and stop complaining when they ask to attend a conference.

Missing Teachers

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If your child’s teacher is out sick this week, think twice. She just might be in California with 25,000 other early childhood teachers at the largest conference of its kind in the world. Anaheim, California is host to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) annual conference. The doors flew open at noon today and the exhibit hall looked like a life-size ant farm with thousands of people scrambling for every free thing they could find. It didn’t take long for science hungry teachers to find our booth and cash in on the free Tornado Tube offer for the first 1,000 teachers. This year we’re fortunate to have 6 teacher Ambassadors from our Hands-on Science Institute behind the booth to share their teaching ideas that are guaranteed to make science fun.