What do inline skates, CDs, Frisbees, and even the clothes you wear have in common? On a Thursday in late August, science educator Cassie Byrd (pictured) put the question to the homeschooled girls participating in the Exploratorium’s Girls’ Science Institute.

The answer, of course, is polymers. Cassie explained how she chose the hands-on activities for the chemistry part of the Institute. “I searched howtosmile.org for polymers; the first thing that came up was Playing with Polymers,” which shows kids how to make everyone’s favorite substance–flubber.

The second activity took a little more tweaking. “Shrinkers — [in which learners compare the size and shape of plastic pieces before and after heating and cooling] is really heavy with science,” says Cassie, “which is good.  But I wanted a more creative environment, so I modified the activity so that the girls could use the shrinking process to create charms for bracelets or necklaces.”

Homeschool programs, with and without parents

Girls’ Science Institute is only one of many workshops at the Exploratorium’s Homeschool Science Program, now in its third year. Most courses are co-ed and until this year, parents were always part of the workshops. “They played a teacher’s role, mostly,” says Cassie, and were a lot of help. But recent workshops have experimented with having just the kids and not the parents.

It’s a different dynamic, says Cassie. Learners may feel more freedom to explore what they (rather than their parents) are interested in. But without the parents, Cassie notes, there are more classroom management issues, much like in a traditional classroom—issues of keeping students engaged and on task.

“But these kids are a pretty self-selected group. For the most part they want to be here, and they really love science. So they’re great to work with.”

Gender difference and a reading station

Cassie coordinates the Homeschool Program with Ken Finn, and both educators are always trying out new approaches. In the Girls’ Science Institute, for example, Cassie created a “Reading Station” in the classroom. It started the first day almost by chance. As they waited for all the participants to arrive, Cassie said to the early arrivers, “I have a stack of books over in the corner about women and science. Take a look if you feel like it.”

The girls did feel like it. They took to the “educational comics” in particular. Capstone Press’ Graphic Biographies series has books on women scientists like Nobel Prize-winner Marie Curie, who did groundbreaking work on radioactivity, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female M.D. in the United States.

At lunch that first day, the girls gravitated back to what had now become the Reading Station, and on the morning of the second day, they made a beeline there as well. Cassie had beefed up the selection, and much to her surprise, she found that throughout the day the girls would mention things they’d read in the books.

“They’d be doing these hands-on activities, saying to each other stuff like, ‘Did you know that Elizabeth Blackwell knew Florence Nightingale?’ They really got into it.”

On the third day, girls even brought science books from home to add to the Reading Station.

“I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or just the temperament of these particular learners,” says Cassie, “but the girls were generally mellow in the mornings and would choose to read quietly on their own before the workshop began. Another noticeable difference was personal space–the girls would often share a chair and sit very close to one another while doing activities.  When I brought them together as a group to show them something, they would all sit, lie, or sprawl on the table to crowd around what I was demonstrating.  These actions were very different from my co-ed classes.”

Ask Suzy Gurton, Education Manager at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, about hands-on astronomy, and you’ll be disabused of any notion that studying the cosmos need be a solely intellectual pursuit.

She’ll remind you that building your own telescope is very hands-on, as is experimenting with colored filters and simple spectroscopes to understand how images from telescopes like the Hubble are created.

But Gurton really waxes eloquent when you get her on the subject of models. “You can’t build a star,” she says, “but you can build a model of a star, and you can model the universe.”

It’s two hundred toilet paper squares to Pluto

One of her favorite model-building activities is the Toilet Paper Solar System. “It may start as a sort of gag–kids love bathroom humor, and they get to thinking about doing a TP job on their classroom–but this activity has so much to keep them busy counting and labeling that they never get the chance to get into mischief.”

The activity, however giggle-inducing, actually teaches something quite profound: that the common grade-school model of the universe, with planets equidistant from each other, is a serious misrepresentation. “By the time the kids are done,” says Gurton, “they see just how “crowded” the inner solar system is and how much space is between the outer planets.” In fact, you need 200 toilet paper squares (this activity’s unit of measurement) to get out to Pluto! Yes, Pluto has been demoted (I hate that term! says Gurton) to a Dwarf Planet, but we have such a long-standing relationship to that celestial body, we’re loath to exclude it when we model the non-dwarf planets.

“Introducing this activity is great fun,” Gurton notes. “I’ve seen one of our volunteers do it in a classroom where he first goes through the order of the planets from the sun, then goes on and on about the difficulty of developing a scale model of the orbits of the planets and how it requires a very special “chart paper.” Finally he pulls that special chart paper out of his shopping bag, and it’s a roll of toilet paper! It gets a laugh every time.”

Gurton cautions that you need a lot of indoor space to do this activity–enough to spool out an entire roll of toilet paper. And since toilet paper is delicate and tears easily, doing the activity outdoors can be a challenge.

A kid-sized universe, and bringing math to the table

Not enough room indoors to unroll an entire roll of toilet paper? Try the Pocket Solar System activity. Kids create a solar system (with adding machine tape) that is as big as they are, then are able to fold it up and put it in their pocket. Math can be emphasized or deemphasized depending on your audience–the Pocket Solar System is perfect for teaching fractions, if the kids are ready for that.

“It’s always an interesting mathematical exercise to try to develop a scale model of the orbits of the planets,” says Gurton. “But quite frankly the math can be intimidating to some. I love models because you can either start with the math or skip it,” providing learners with the numbers. The challenge then is in actually building the model, and learners still get to have a kinesthetic experience of the scale of our universe.

An inclusive science

Beyond its connections to math, “the science of astronomy is so wonderfully inclusive,” Gurton notes. “It has connections to all other sciences. In looking at the formation of planets, you can look at the conditions necessary for life. Through the study of stellar evolution, you get both thermodynamics and nuclear physics. The laws of physics we’ve figured out here on Earth can be applied to places we’ll never be able to go. And one of the most profound repercussions of the space program was seeing our planet from afar, being able to look back at how fragile and tiny it really its. This new point of view helped launch the environmental movement.”

Another thing Gurton loves about studying astronomy, she says, is that it gives you a “tremendous sense of place–in both space and time.”

Photos of Suzy Gurton courtesy of Suzy Gurton.

SMILE’s September 2010 eNewsletter is dedicated entirely to astronomy. Sign up for the newsletter.

Visit howtosmile.org.

When astronomer Isabel Hawkins was growing up in Argentina, an encyclopedia salesman showed up at the door one day with an illustrated book about the planets.

“There was this one picture of Jupiter” says Isabel, “floating in the blackness of space. It was that image, of this mysterious planet, this exotic world surrounded in blackness, that made me want to understand what it was all about.”

Isabel didn’t just look at stars and planets in books. At a ranch outside of Cordoba (her hometown), she would lay out in the fields at night, watching for shooting stars. She was in the southern hemisphere, so she could also see the Magellanic Clouds, “two irregular galaxies that are companions to our own.” At first she thought they were actual clouds, but they didn’t move, and they appeared night after night in the same spot. It was that mystery–and the image of Jupiter–that got her “hooked on the idea of even considering astronomy as a career.”

Total eclipse of the sun

Hawkins saw her first live solar eclipse on March 29, 2006, in Turkey. “I had never seen a total solar eclipse, though I had seen many pictures of it, and I’d seen live webcasts and video.”

“But nothing prepares you for being there. It’s not just the image of the moon covering the sun and seeing the corona. It’s the entire context, and being able to share that moment with a bunch of other people. You felt the dynamic movement of the moon, the sun, and the earth; you felt part of this movement. It’s a humbling moment. It’s a moment of pure acceptance—that we are part and parcel of this universe.”

We are stardust

Ultimately, says Hawkins, astronomy is a common ground that unifies all of humanity under the same canopy. “We all have the night sky, we all have the sun. Even if you can’t see, you still feel the sun.”

When Hawkins gives talks or workshops, she likes to ask people to hold themselves. She tells people, ‘Go ahead and just hug yourself. What do you feel?’

“They look at me like I’m crazy,” she admits. “Then I tell them, ‘You are touching atoms that were part of stars five billion years ago.’ So it’s really neat to think that we are indeed stardust. That is literally true; it’s not a metaphor.

“If you talk to elders from around the world,” Hawkins continues. “almost all of them will tell you that we are related to the stars, and that we’re related to the moon, and the sun, and, of course, the earth. In the Navajo language, the word for ‘star’ translates as ‘the ancient relation from which I came.’”

Hawkins has retired from her position of research astronomer at UC Berkeley and now works with the Exploratorium in San Francisco, helping to foster a love of the stars in young people. Learn more about Hawkins and astronomy in this  audio slide show, and check out some of SMILE’s hands-on astronomy activities.

 Photos: Amy Snyder

SMILE’s September 2010 eNewsletter is dedicated entirely to astronomy. Sign up for the newsletter.

Visit howtosmile.org.

Educator Cheryl McCallum talks about one of her favorite SMILE outdoor activities, and how to make it work even if you don’t have “an outdoor space teeming with living things.”

These days, I work in a museum. But before that I was an “outdoor educator,” taking 5th graders on hikes through the East Texas Piney Woods and canoe trips on Lake Livingston.

With my outdoor roots in mind, I took howtosmile for a spin to figure out what they have for “outdoor ed.” First up on my search list was Is It Living? — one of my all-time favorite investigations.

Young kids, up through the early grades, have a hard time identifying what’s alive and what’s not. For example, they may think, “Maybe water is alive, because it moves. Trees are alive because they move. And everything that you can’t see is non-living.”

Is It Living? gets kids outside, where they explore their environment and talk about what in it is alive and what isn’t. It’s these kinds of guided explorations of the natural world that provide a foundation for more sophisticated concepts later on, such as the fact (mentioned in the activity) that living things on Earth require water, but living things in other parts of the universe may not.

If you’d like to try this activity, but don’t feel that you have an outdoor space teeming with living things, do a “micro hike.” Each child can measure out a square foot of outdoor space or put a hula hoop down to define their area. Then with a magnifying glass, they scan the entire area for living and non-living things. If weather permits, have your discussion outdoors rather than going inside.

Cheryl McCallum is Director of Education at the Children’s Museum of Houston, one of SMILE’s founding partners.

I still remember when my sixth grade science teacher took us outside, gave us each a block of wood and a magnifying glass, and showed us how to harness the sun’s energy to burn our zodiac sign into wood.

Sure, the zodiac thing dates me (I’m a Cancer, an unfortunately named sign if there ever was one). But I feel fortunate to have grown up when field trips and outdoor education were still a vital part of hands-on science education.

In his 2008 book “Last Child in the Woods,” Richard Louv describes what happens when an entire generation of young people becomes disconnected from the natural world: they can identify hundreds of corporate logos and dozens of Pokémon characters but have trouble (according to a 2002 British study) naming “otter, beetle, and oak tree.”

Louv also coined the evocative (if alarmist) term “nature-deficit disorder,” which is meant to suggest a syndrome suffered by society at large, rather than a diagnosis applied to individuals. But we as individuals can fight against it, by getting out from behind the computers and gameboys and into the wider natural world.

The movement to reverse the tide of this ‘disorder’ is growing. There’s even a bill before the U.S. Senate to pass the No Child Left Inside Act. The name of the act is, of course, a play on the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001, which has led to schools sacrificing subjects such as environmental education, social studies, and science to spend more time teaching to high-stakes reading and math tests. Field trips and outdoor learning activities have also been cut in the quest to prepare students for the all-important standardized tests.

But don’t wait for federal legislation: make an effort to get the kids (and yourself) outside right now. Real-life lessons learned in the fresh air seem to “stick” in ways that classroom learning doesn’t. Focus on what’s most evident on a glorious summer day–the sun–and use it to make a sun print or to tell time with the sun. Keep cool with a water pressure blaster that’s almost as much fun as having your own fire hose. We’ve even got a how-to video of the Blaster activity.

SMILE’s July e-newsletter focused outdoor science. Sign up for the newsletter or see a sample newsletter.

Blast from the past

Remember when zodiac signs and outdoor education were still important?

The art of decorating a material with burn marks is called pyrography — “writing with fire.” It can be done using a tip heated by fire or electricity, or by focusing sunlight through a lens. The bigger the lens, the bigger the burn mark. Fine detail can be done using a small lens.

Retro wood-burning shots from Mother Earth News.

Since April 20, people around the world have watched as millions of gallons of oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. We tune in to news accounts of oil-covered pelicans, tar balls on beaches, and underwater “plumes” that may be even more damaging that the oil washing up on our shorelines. An entire ecosystem, not to mention people’s livelihoods, is in peril.

The sadness and disgust run deep. Political columnist David Brooks, speaking on the June 11 PBS Newshour, said,

“We’re Americans, and deep in our cultural DNA is a sense of wilderness, of nature, that is a part of us. And whether it’s Alaska, or out west, or the Gulf, when that’s polluted, it goes deep into the spiritual sense of who we are as a country.”

Thinking about solutions

Because our response to the spill is so visceral–you can almost feel the oil on your skin when you hear reports of it spreading ever further–the most effective teaching tools may also be visceral.

For me, that means hands-on activities. Here’s an example: with little more than cooking oil and cheesecloth, you can create your own mini-spill in your classroom or kitchen, then have learners experiment with ways to collect and dispose of spilled oil.

Howtosmile.org has other hands-on activities related to oil spills as well. For more background science, check out Kim Lightle’s recent post on the spill, which lists resources including those that provide images of the spill, a chemistry perspective, and an online tool for showing how big the spill is compared to your town.

SMILE’s May e-newsletter focused on teaching to the spill. Sign up for the newsletter or see a sample newsletter.

Hands-on ways to help

You can take ‘hands-on’ even more literally, with these citizen science projects that aim to help us understand the extent of the environmental damage wrought by the spill.

Help count ghost crabs in affected areas

Drew Wheelan of the American Birding Association models his crab-counting citizen science project on similar bird counts. “By taking a close look at the populations of the ghost crab,” he writes on his blog, “we may be able to paint a more detailed picture of what has happened to these near-shore ecosystems, and the birds that inhabit them. We are asking that people here in affected areas count ghost crabs, but also anyone else, even if the oil may never touch your shores.” Wheelan gives explicit, step-by-step instructions on how to help out in a recent blog post.

There’s an app for everything

If you’re in the Gulf area, you could collect spill data using your iPhone. MoGO (Mobile Gulf Observatory) is a free app that turns you into a citizen scientist: you take and submit photos of oiled, injured, and dead marine and coastal wildlife; tar balls on beaches; oil slicks on water; and oiled coastal habitats, thereby helping wildlife experts find and rescue oiled birds, sea turtles, and dolphins.

Photo of oily bird (at top of post) by Greenpeace