Hello Wood School Parents! We are thrilled to be spending this coming year with your child. We will meet with them once every other week and always bring a fun science activity with us. Sometimes this will be an engineering challenge, and other times it will be a chemistry experiment, a game, various stations to explore or a puzzle.
As your scientists, we’d love to take a moment to introduce ourselves. Dr. Sandra Pearl has had 5 children pass through the Wood School and brings to you teaching experience and her knowledge as a PhD in Neuroscience. Mrs. Jayne Mirabassi has a physics and math background and has been a middle school math teacher and mother of multiple children. Together we hope to inspire a love of science in your children!
We sent home a handout with your children today that shows how to login and access our website (which you will have done if you can read this!). This website will give you an update of what we did with your child in science class and will have pictures of students from throughout the day. We also encourage you to find the student follow up activity, which expands on what we did in class using items you can easily find around the home.
Today in class we asked students to explain how science is like a puzzle, and then had them do a real puzzle where we gave them 4 pieces (“data”) to put together. After they were able to fit all of their data together, we explained that often in science we think we know something but then a whole new piece of data comes along and we have to modify our thinking completely (remember when Pluto was a real planet?). To this extent we added a 5th piece to their puzzle and students were forced to find a new way to create a 5-piece square puzzle. Certainly this was a challenge to the students and they had to demonstrate insight, perseverance, patience and mind flexibility!
As a bonus we also brought in real sheep and mice brains to show the students. While they were initially grossed out seeing the preserved brains they quickly became fascinated and loved looking at them. Please ask your child what they learned about brains!
We come again to the Wood School on 11/9 and will be bringing a lesson called “Save the Beach!” we where will tie into their current weather module and learn how beaches erode and what we can do to help save them.
Please feel free to make comments on this site or to contact Dr. Pearl with any questions at sandy@sciencefromscientists.org. We welcome parents to come in anytime to watch what we do with the students and to help out. Please come by if you have a chance!
Dr. Pearl and Mrs. Mirabassi
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