Welcome to the first official posting under this new category. In these installments, I’ll be sharing science projects developed over many years while serving as The Science Mom at my local elementary school and in a community after-school program.  When my friend Jean Southland and I first started the in-class projects, the teacher invited us in on Mondays, to create a fun activity for that worst-of-days to students, the First Day of the School Week. We fooled around with ideas to give this extra science class a name and settled on Jean’s simple and inviting “Messy Monday”. Since then, Jean moved on to wider-scale education duties, from teaching to administration, and she is now head of a local charter school. In the meantime, I continued with developing classroom-scale science projects and coaching a small robotics team.
When the youngest of my kids finally moved on from elementary school and my geek needs were being satisfied by playing with robots, I felt twinges of guilt that I was leaving the next round of students in the lurch. The most-frequent comments I heard when running science project sessions could be summarized as: “I could never do that”. Sometimes it was the teacher, in which case she/he would mean  “I can’t spare the time to figure out supply lists, shop for stuff, sort out materials, and test procedures.” Other times, it was another parent, in which case the meaning was either  “I could do that, if only someone would explain what it’s supposed to mean” or “I understand the science, but someone needs to give me a checklist to follow.”  And in these times, potential cost is always a concern, as most supplemental projects—from field trips to science experiments—end up being funded by parents or from teachers’ own pockets.
In these episodes, I’ll be having a stab at meeting both sets of needs. With any luck, the end result will be a book of “recipes” for science projects with enough information provided for teachers to slot into their curricula in order to satisfy the science standards they must meet, with clear supply lists to distribute to classroom-helper parents, and with step-by-step instructions for completing projects that any interested parent or teacher will be able to not only follow but build upon to suit their own audiences. While (like every other blog in the Known Universe) the ultimate result is to be a book of projects that a teacher or parent helper could have at hand, in the short term, there will be first, these erratic blog entries and second, a series of leaflet-style e-docs in a more readable/printable form, to be available from the usual e-book suppliers. Think of the blog entries as the beta version, the leaflets as the Basic Edition release, and the eventual book as the Portmanteau Edition, with updates, extensions, and add-on packs as needed.
To open the subject, I’ll be delivering a flurry of quick posts to get things started, but then will back off to a more regular pace. The goal is to deliver one project-worth of information in no more than two weeks.
Every Messy Monday project guide has four key components:
- Â A set of notes for project leaders, sketching the key elements of the project and the science topic it is meant to address
- A detailed supply list, structured to make it simple to purchase supplies for either a one-shot demonstration or for a classroom-sized group activity.
- A set of instructions for working through the project with students, including commentary to help cope with common classroom-management issues, questions that are likely to arise, and issues to keep in mind from safety to fairness.
- A rough estimate of the cost to run the project.
So, let’s get started with a truly cometary project…
