Teacher Appreciation Month – Honor Your Favorite Science Teacher
Note from the Editor, May 15th – Our Teacher Appreciation Contest has ended. We will be picking the winners today. Thanks to everyone who submitted their awesome teachers for the contest.
This is one of the greatest parts of my job – I always look forward to Teacher Appreciation month. My team at Steve Spangler Science would like to help you recognize and honor an outstanding science teacher in your community. If there’s a science teacher who has made a positive impact in your child’s life, done something great for the school or is just a great teacher, let us help you honor that person.
This year we are giving away thirty gift certificates to SteveSpanglerScience.com valued at $35 each and your favorite teacher might be one of the lucky recipients.
While coffee coupons and mugs with clever sayings are the standard, we want to give you a chance to be creative and say thank you to an outstanding science teacher by allowing him or her to select their own gift. There are over a thousand cool science toys and hands-on science activities at www.SteveSpanglerScience.com. We love to show our appreciation to great science teachers – we just need your help finding them.
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. 
When you work on the morning show of a news station, getting up early is just a way of life. The alarm clock went off at 3 AM this morning and I was on my way to meet another great teacher. The kids at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lakewood love Fred Scherrer. He makes science come alive for 4th, 5th and 6th graders. Most days you’ll find him in his white lab coat, hunched over some kind of hands-on experiment that gets his kids all amped up and ready to learn. 
