The Carnival of Education, #180
What makes a good science fair, a good school, a good science lesson? Hands-on exploration and discovery are a great start and never forget to instill a sense of wonder and curiosity in our students.
Without enthusiasm and even a little risk sometimes, learning can quickly become a dead end street. Where there's boredom, there's danger.
No worries about any of that here, though. The teachers who have contributed to this week's Carnival of Education are all of those good things... and MORE.
Let's visit some of them, shall we?
(more...)
Our week-long salute to amazing science teachers wraps up with a visit to Heritage High School in Littleton, Colorado, where chemistry teacher Wally Keesecker gets students fired up about science. Wally is well-known for his attention-grabbing science demos that introduce students to real-world connections to everyday chemistry.
The next stop on our week-long tour was Hamilton Middle School in the Denver Public Schools to shine the spotlight on Ms. Emily Pringle, science teacher extraordinaire. Emily Pringle has taught there for eight years and uses the scientific method to make the light bulbs come on in her bright, young eager students. She and the kids showed us her candle lab experiment, also known as the "composition of air" demonstration. Here's the concept... A candle sits in the bottom of a dish full of colored water. The candle is lighted and covered with a test tube or jar. When the candle burns out (because of the lack of oxygen), the water rises in the test tube. Data is gathered as to the volume of water that displaces the air in the tube. Ms. Pringle's class concluded from the experiment that 21% of the air that we breathe is oxygen (and the students are correct!). 
When it comes to doing science, I'll volunteer for anything - fear is not a factor for me. Then I visited Pam Schmidt's class at Thunder Ridge Middle School in Centennial, Colorado... and 49 of her pet snakes! That's right, at 5:30 in the morning, I was greeted by a room full of enthusiastic kids all holding snakes - big snakes. Each snake has a name - there's Phantom, a 12' 11" Albino Burmese Python and Jazira, a 16" Blotched King snake. Pam loves snakes, and shares that passion with all her students who learn plenty about their biology, habitat and eating habits. 