Last night was the Young Relative's open house at Hillendale Elementary, and I was blown away by the talent and creativity of the students. Their science projects were ingenious: as a baker I especially liked one experiment where two girls tested whether adding food coloring to vanilla cupcakes affected taste-testers' ratings. (It did. They ran the statistics and showed sample forms from the taste-testers.)
In another project the Young Relative and his colleagues had to try to solve a CSI-like murder involving a poisoned soda, given a set of clues. They used pH, DNA, chromatography, fiber analysis and other techniques to narrow the list of suspects. There was no one "right" answer; each student just had to present the most convincing case he or she could. One student prepared a final report that was so professional-looking I thought it was perhaps a corporate newsletter.
Outside of one classroom was a bulletin-board display of Idioms. The kids drew the literal meaning of phrases like "in one ear and out the other," "head full of rocks" and "his bark is worse than his bite" -- hilarious cartoons! -- and then stated the figurative meaning.
Do I need to say that the Tally-ho family will miss Hillendale Elementary next year?
No comments:
Post a Comment