Tag Archives: NCSF

Co-Pilots.

I’m sure many of us feel this way, but my project/curriculum would never have been conceivable had I not been partnered with the North Carolina Science Festival.

My mentors, Marissa Hartzler (NCSF K-12 Programs Coordinator) and Jonathan Frederick (NCSF Director) were instrumental in my creation of this curriculum and the success that came from it as I implemented it in my classroom.

With Marissa and Jonathan!
With Marissa and Jonathan!

Between the three of us, we were constantly exchanging emails with links and ideas for the curriculum. We would find an article that would link us to a video that would remind us of this other activity we saw on NASA’s website and the trail sharing continued. Marissa was an incredible sounding board for my ideas and brought a welcome perspective as a K-12 program coordinator and previous educator.

As I went about teaching my curriculum to my class last semester, I asked Marissa to come co-teach a lesson with me. She was able to come and work with both of my classes, which was amazing considering that’s two hours of time in a day that isn’t back-to-back. We discussed weather patterns and how weather impacts flight and launch dates/times, and she was able to discuss in more detail the current events we saw with the Antares rocket launch. We tracked the ISS with my kids and factored in the weather forecasts at the time, highlighting how there are people at NASA doing that very job in that very moment (needless to say, my kids thought that was one of the coolest things EVER).

Marissa also brought my kids a stuffed Kelvin, the NCSF mascot, for our classroom. Kelvin now hangs out in the front of the room and the kids LOVE having him as our class mascot. 🙂

Our class mascot (and the NCSF mascot) Kelvin hanging out with us at Astronaut Boot Camp!
Our class mascot (and the NCSF mascot) Kelvin hanging out with us at Astronaut Boot Camp!

The collaboration to make this curriculum happen has been unreal. I have been connected to people at Morehead Planetarium, librarians from across the state, UNC children’s literature experts, NCSU aerospace engineering students, and more — all thanks to the mentorship I’ve had with Marissa and Jonathan at the NCSF.

Huge ups to my mentors for all their hard work and flexibility throughout this project; couldn’t have done any of this without such incredible co-pilots!

One-Way Flight

As I type this, I sit at my desk in the North Carolina Science Festival/Morehead Production Team office above Sugarland and Carolina Coffee Shop on Franklin Street. My water bottle drips a few beads of sweat while I pull my denim shirt tighter around me to ward off impending goosebumps. I think I might miss being perpetually chilly…

Today is my last day in the office with the team. I’m heading to Ohio for a few days with family, and when I return it’ll be time for me to start whipping my elementary school classroom into shape before the workdays start (does anyone else find it completely absurd that on workdays we never have actual chunks of time to get our classrooms ready? Or is that just me?). Truly, this summer has flown by.

It feels not so long ago that we were all at NCCAT meeting one another for the first time, making connections with our spirit dogs, and adventuring down the Nantahala (HOW GREAT WAS THAT?!).

As I sit here, I find the time to type this because my lessons are completed. My supplemental materials are finished. All that’s left for me to do is wait — I want to review the curriculum with the other third grade teachers at my school, and my mentors need to review the curriculum as well. I’ve started taking the teacher lesson plans I’ve written and translating them into layman’s terms for the Festival’s public library program so we can put together some one-page activity guides.

I’ve also been sketching planes and rockets, but that’s been happening since all this started in the middle of June.

This has been an experience that was unexpected yet wonderful. I’ve learned a lot, and not only in regards to flight. I’ve learned about professionalism, how to work with a wide array of people, and increasing community engagement by networking. I knew this internship would look different than that of my peers, and it was hard for me hearing about all the amazing, hands-on activities so many other people were doing throughout the summer while I sat on a computer most of the day. I had to continue to tell myself to be patient, and that my hands-on moments would come, they’d just come later.

Now that our summer chapter is coming to an end, I’m feeling very hopeful, excited, and happy. I feel very good about my program activities, and I can’t wait to see them translated into activity guides for librarians, informal educators, and other teachers to use. I think the lessons are solid and the community outreach piece that we’re still working on will be just as strong. I’m excited to continue my connections with people at places like the Carolinas Aviation Museum, North Carolina Library Services, and the Wright Brothers Memorial. I’m beyond excited to start communication with companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin (insert nerd FREAK OUT here).

Ultimately, I just cannot wait to meet the sweet babies that get to be my passengers on this curriculum pilot with me!

[Puns!]

This whole summer has given me a fresh perspective on what it means to really engage my students. I like to think I’m fairly aware of what hooks my kiddos, and I’m constantly trying to do all that I can to make their learning experiences enjoyable ones. I’ve seen firsthand the effectiveness of getting kids to create and do, not just “sit and get” their information, and between my previous classroom experiences and this summer’s KFP experience, I’m more cognizant of how imperative it is to grab student attention with science.

Even though today is my last day in the office with NCSF and Morehead staff, they know they’ll have to do more than take away my keys to rid me of this office. 🙂

Here’s to a beautiful summer filled with experiential learning, and an even more beautiful start to a new school year!

Elevators Enhancing Lift

The elevators of an aircraft are located on the horizontal stabilizers and work to provide lift for the aircraft. Lift’s force has to be stronger than that of the weight of the aircraft in order for it to fly, and I think I’m finally getting my lift on, y’all.

Throughout the summer, thinking about curriculum hasn’t been the easiest. At the Science Festival, we probably went through at least two or three ideas of what we thought this project would look like until we came up with our definitive vision just a week or so ago. This was hard for me because I like to think writing curriculum is something I’m pretty good at, but when you’re writing and scrapping repeatedly, you don’t exactly feel the most effective.

After meeting with librarians and a children’s literature expert, and having phone conferences with the youth services state librarian coordinator and the Carolinas Aviation Museum, a clear, attainable vision has been drawn out before me, and I like the way that feels.  Getting input from these stakeholders has been imperative, because they’re the people for whom I’m doing this. I am desperately searching out feedback for this program from librarians, because I want what I write to be beneficial to them and successful for the children they reach. I want libraries to use this program and see growth in their attendance and individual programs as well.

So, maybe (hopefully) you’re wondering what kind of curriculum it is that I’m finally writing.

Initially, our plan was the four forces of flight — thinking along the lines of physics and how it would be best to disseminate that information to young children. We tested paper airplane models, did a lot of Googling research, and found that maybe we need to take a different approach to this considering the fact that this concept seemed a bit overdone. Granted, just because something is overdone doesn’t mean it’s (a) done well or (b) impossible to do again, but at the Science Festival we’re always looking for ways to be innovative.

A few weeks later and our track is completely different.

Instead of honing in on the physics, we’re extending our runway and encompassing ALL the ways science is tied to flight. We’re looking at the biology (why wings are shaped after birds’ wings, how to survive in space), chemistry (acid-base bottle rockets, how the chemical reactions of rocket fuel work), engineering (prototyping paper planes, learning how the Wright Brothers crafter their successful powered glider), meteorology (kite-building/testing, weather observations linked to rocket launches), and physics (demos with Bernoulli’s principle, four forces of flight basics).

So yeah, we’re covering all the bases. It’s been especially fun for me to think of the bilingual/biliteracy piece, and when coming up with vocabulary and resources I’m doing my best to find things in both English and Spanish. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that others will find this as useful as I do.

I really, truly, massively love this approach to teaching kids about flight. I think it’s crucial to let kids know how multi-faceted and integrated our lives are — flight isn’t just about engineering a plane to fly, but it’s also about things like material making and understanding how to read maps in an air traffic control tower. This is a great plug for integration across subjects, which is big at my school where we do project-based learning.

In addition to the above science-themed activities, I’m also working on a book list, which I mentioned in a previous post. The list is growing and includes informational and fiction books for K-5 students. There’s a little bit of everything on the list, from graphic novels to picture books to biographies to historical fiction. As a reading teacher, this has been so fun to put together and hear from others about what they’d like to see on a list like this. I’ve been working on some fun visual storytelling and writing activities for the program, too.

In my last post, I mentioned how I wasn’t sure how I would make this fit into my classroom, considering this program I’m writing is specifically for libraries, and librarians were adamant about not receiving anything remotely close to a lesson plan for the program. I was a little concerned because I had already spelled out this great culminating task (well, I think it’s great and I have really high hopes for the implementation of the project this fall!) and was hoping my experience with the NCSF would help me knock out some fun, engaging lessons to lead up to that task. Well, fortunately after talking to one of my mentors, we were able to come up with some more space-themed activities for the library program activity menu, and now I’ll be able to implement those in my class this fall!

Everything is a rough draft and a work in progress, but the way the curriculum writing path is now leading feels good. I have clarity, I know what needs to be done, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to knock out some solid lessons for this program that’ll be usable in both a classroom and a library.

Skies are clear and there’s nowhere to go but up.

Connecting Flights

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I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about how to connect my current summer work with my classroom come August, and to be honest it’s a little tricky.

The program I am working on with the Science Festival has me developing curriculum for libraries across the state. This is all well and good, but the largest part of how I’m spending my time is working on something that I won’t necessarily be directly implementing in my classroom.

A few weeks ago, we met with some librarians from Durham County Libraries (DURHAM REPRESENT!), and we had a very productive, informative meeting. Something that struck me as surprising was how adamant the librarians were that they were NOT teachers, and they do NOT want to see lesson plans of any kind in a program, because libraries are NOT school.

Needless to say, this completely changed my perspective on my project at hand.

I had worked on developing some lessons to teach students about the four basic principles of flight — lift, weight, thrust, and drag. Initially, this was the plan, but I’ve come to find out that plans change very quickly. Upon hearing this, a new direction had to be set with our programming. I still have all the lessons I wrote initially, and I will probably use them in some capacity in my class.

The most relevant thing I think about this project is a vetted book list I’m creating with books for all grade levels, K-5, about flight. I’m working with a children’s literature specialist from UNC on vetting the list, and I’m getting input from other librarians and teachers in my network. I do a lot of read alouds in my reading class, and reading about flight will definitely help kids make explicit connections for their project time.

When I started this project, I was under the impression we’d be looking at not only plane flight, but space flight as well. Right before school was out for the summer, I came up with an incredibly integrated culminating task for my unit on solar system, physics, and economy, and I was hoping that would play nicely into the work I’d do at the Science Festival. Needless to say, the jury is still kind of out on that one.

I’m really enjoying my time with the NC Science Festival, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to create a program for libraries across the state to use to further science education, specifically about flight. I’m also curious to get a clearer picture of how I can use what I’m doing now to shape what I do in my classroom with my third graders.