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from the issue of September 20, 2007
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Natural Resources project educates McPhee students
Bringing life to environmental science
BY LORI MCGINNIS, COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Many of the children who attend Lincoln's McPhee Elementary School live in places where they are not able to run barefoot through grass in their yards or pick flowers from gardens.
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| | | BUDDING SCIENTISTS - McPhee Elementary students look into a container filled with earthworms as they prepare to learn about environmental science. Courtesy photos by John Quinn.
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The children who attend McPhee, 820 Goodhue Blvd. near downtown, do not live in homes where yards or parks are easily accessible, said Bess Scott principal at McPhee. As a result, the children lack environmental and scientific experiences in their play and learning time, she said.
Once two graduate students from the School of Natural Resources learned about the situation at McPhee, they stepped in to help bring change.
Kimberly Payne, a master's student in soil science studies from Benton, Ark., and Marcy Pummill, a master's student in wildlife ecology from St. Louis and an assistant with Project WET and Project Learning Tree, have helped McPhee students learn about environmental science for about the past year and a half.
Payne and Pummill, who graduated in August, wrapped up their work as Lincoln Public Schools ended classes in June.
"The main goal was to show kids that science is fun and you don't have to be a genius to do science," Payne said. "All you have to do is wonder about it."
Payne and Pummill began their work in the 2005-06 academic year by starting a science club at McPhee and helping students conduct science projects. They also worked with children of all ages, from the preschool Head Start program through fifth grade, teaching them about such things as water, soil, climate and ecology.
McPhee students even learned the seven steps to scientific method: ask a question; form a hypothesis; gather materials and decide on a method; conduct an experiment; record the results; draw a conclusion; and site sources.
"It's amazing. They learned the scientific method really well," Payne said. "We would ask them, 'what's the first step of the scientific method' and they would all shout 'ask a question!'"
| | KEEPING TRACK - A McPhee Elementary School student fills fills out a data sheet as part of a classroom experiment.
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Scott said the graduate students began work at McPhee as the school was in the midst of a Greenspace project to transform its inner city, concrete and pebble playground into an outdoor education classroom.
Students at McPhee typically live in low-income apartments and 85 percent of them qualify for free and reduced lunches. Fifty-five percent are students of color. Many of them don't know what it's like to play outside in a yard or grow plants in a garden, she said.
"The kids had a great time and they were very enthusiastic," Payne said. "It was fun to just see their eyes light up and their curiosity peak. I'm not sure who got more out of it, them or me."
Some of the children even said they wanted to be scientists when they grew up, Pummill said.
"It was very exciting to see we might end up being the spark for some child to become involved in science," Pummill said.
Scott said she noticed a marked improvement in student vocabulary, as students learned scientific words like "hypothesis." Vocabulary is especially important because in lower income schools like McPhee, research indicates children enter school knowing 300 to 500 words compared to 10 times that in higher income schools, Scott said.
"The relationship between School of Natural Resources students and McPhee Elementary connects young, urban, diverse students to the wonders and challenges of the environment and environmental science," Scott said. "I can only imagine what positive long-term results will occur."
GO TO: ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 20
NEWS HEADLINES FOR SEPTEMBER 20
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732939S37295X
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