Local industry leaders were at Caledonia Middle School on Wednesday morning to judge the school’s first science fair.
Science teacher Renee Allen said she decided to have her students conduct a science project as a way of implementing Common Core.
“Common Core brings everything back to student learning,” Allen said. “We’re teaching the class and applying it to real world situations. With that in mind, we thought a science project would be a great way to get that through.”
Students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades began working on their projects in October. The projects counted as half of the student’s semester exam grade.
Allen said seeing her students learn and grow from hands on experience was encouraging.
“We’re not teaching them, they’re teaching us with this,” she said. “It’s nice to see them work through their obstacles.”
Ethan Redulski is a 6th grader at Caledonia Middle who conducted an experiment on mold. Redulski said he decided to study mold because it’s “gross.”
“I thought it would be pretty cool to see how fast mold grows,” Redulski said.
Redulski took a can of tomato soup, divided it among four containers and then added outside elements, like dog hair, mold and dirt from his little brother’s fingers. The sixth grader said he expected mold in the tomato soup to grow the fastest but his study proved otherwise.
“I found that a second graders fingers grew the fastest, after a day of school, hands unwashed,” he said. Redulski said the mold “looks sort of like seashells” and now, his mother makes his little brother wash his hands more often. Redulski thoroughly enjoyed conducting the experiment, saying, “My favorite part was coming back and seeing how much mold there was on everything.”
Ashley Burkes is a senior process engineer at Tronox and was one of the judges at Wednesday’s fair.
“I’ve been doing mainly microbiology and chemistry,” Burkes said. “I’m not a huge microbiology fan, I don’t care much about mold but it’s so cool to see these kids and what interests them. They’re like ‘It’s cool, it’s great’ and I’m thinking ‘It’s gross! It’s yuck!'”
Despite the mold, Burkes enjoyed seeing the excitement in the students.
“They seem encouraged with it and they seem proud of their work,” she said. “It’s a feeling of accomplishment and something they can feel good about to see the results.”
Rodger Coan, maintenance manager at Weyerhaeuser, echoed Burkes sentiment about the excitement level of the children.
“The kids have been very excited about what they’re presenting,” Coan said.
Scott McGregor, general manager at Metso Paper, said he and his fellow judges were impressed with the caliber of projects presented.
“We were very impressed with what these guys have put together,” McGregor said. “It’s been encouraging to see these young kids and what they’ve put together.”
Caledonia Middle School principal Karen Pittman also cited the excitement level of the students and said she hopes the science fair will become an annual event
“It has been absolutely wonderful,” Pittman said. “We’ve had a good response from the community as far as judges and a wonderful response from the students.”
See Sunday’s Dispatch for a list of winners from the science fair.
Sarah Fowler covered crime, education and community related events for The Dispatch.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 45 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 45 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
