Oh boy! Next week is going to be heaps of fun, loads of hilarity and mounds of chaos! That's right, next week - Week 4 of the Summer Reading Club - is SCIENCE WEEK! Or perhaps, more appropriately titled "Weird Science - Strange Physics, Cool Chemistry, and Crazy Inventions!", but like the Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" and like Shakespeare's age old adage "brevity is the soul of wit", I prefer "Science Week!" - either way its much easier to remember and way shorter!
So to go along with our "Science Week" this week, we have a very special Guest Wednesday! That's right folks, this week we will be graced with the presence of scientific genius in Selkirk College's Professor of Chemistry - Allyson Perrott!
I just graduated from Selkirk this past Spring, so therefore I was lucky enough to have had Allyson as a teacher quite a few times! She's a fantastic lecturer, an enthusiastic teacher and a great role model. She has a firm philosophy in teaching her students to understand and question what their learning rather than simply memorizing their textbooks and blindly following a teacher's words.
Having read an excerpt from "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster to the Mad Scientists this week, we met the character of Milo, a young boy who is horribly uninterested in everything. Juster wrote on the first page about Milo saying: "since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he [Milo] regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all." I think had Milo had a teacher like Allyson, he would definitely be thinking otherwise
So here is a copy of the poster I made this week to advertise Allyson's visit! Be sure to register guys!
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| Guest Wednesday Poster! July 25, 2012 |
Allyson has already planned out the experiments we will be conducting on Wednesday afternoon and let me just say it's going to be very very awesome! I'll give you some foreshadowing: red cabbages, silver and slime! See what you can make of that!
So .... what else is happening this week? Well, I heard through the grapevine that Mrs. Giles has lots of fun planned for the Little Einsteins on Tuesday morning! For those little guys' theme of the week they will be reading lots of stories and crafts about picnics and ants! Should be lots of fun!
Now, I'm still in the process of planning out our program for next week! My head is full of too many ideas! But I'm pretty sure we may have a couple of fun and refreshing experiments to study next week!
I've also been on the hunt for good science-y books to read with the Young Professors and Mad Scientists! It's tricky to find a fiction book for kids that goes with science, so we may be reading a few non-fiction books! I'm also thinking about continuing to read "The Phantom Tollbooth" with the Mad Scientists since its a really fun book to read!
I did find a cool book at the Crockett Book Company in the Waneta Mall a couple weeks ago! A friend of mine and I went out to the mall in sad lament of the rumored closing of Trail's last and only bookstore! (we also went because of the mass sales opportunities for awesome books!) And I found a great Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith book called "Science Verse" which seems like lots of fun! While I was a bit perturbed with its totally misunderstanding of the theory of evolution (I have my Biology and Anthropology college teachers to blame for teaching me to be aware of common misconceptions of evolution) but I realized that this book isn't supposed to be a college textbook, but rather a fun and silly book about science! And hilarious it is! So good in fact, that I interlibrary loaned the prequel to "Science Verse" called "Math Curse" which is just as silly!
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| A page from Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith |
Anyways, long story short (too late), this week we were surprised to hear that the Crockett Book Company is indeed not closing! HURRAY! So please surport our local bookstore and visit their website: http://www.crockettbookco.com/
Also, in my quest to find awesome ideas for science experiments, I have become addicted to YouTube videos! And of course, the classics, like the Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy!
