. Our projects came to an end this past week with four days of science lessons at Panchayat Union Middle School and Government High School.
The lessons started at Panchayat on Tuesday with the cardboard boat lesson. Kasthuri helped us to translate the lesson into Tamil so that the children would understand the points that we were trying to stress. We've found throughout our time here that the language barrier is a lot more difficult to overcome than we initially expected. We tried to compensate for this by using visuals in our lessons. We asked the children what a boat/ship is, what they are made of, and what they are used for to start off the lesson. Then we proceeded to explain the physics of a boat and how much weight it can carry (in the most basic sense). After the lesson, it was time to build some cardboard boats. We broke the classes up into groups of 4-6 and provided each group with a medium-sized piece of cardboard and an 8 inch segment of tape and gave them about 10 minutes to build a boat. The testing became the most exciting part of the lesson as everyone huddled around the bucket and counted the stones that we dropped into the boats. Many of the students had tried to copy our example by making a square boat, but some got a little more creative. The strongest boat held 222 stones! We were pretty impressed. It took us two days to do the cardboard boat lesson with each of the classes at Panchayat.
On Thursday we went to Panchayat (yet again), but this time we had supplies for our Mindtrekkers demonstrations in hand rather than cardboard. We performed two demonstrations for each class: the CO2 balloon and Oobleck. Madelyn was appointed master of baking soda and vinegar, performing the CO2 balloon demonstration for the day. The demonstration was well received (especially because they got to play with the balloon afterward), but it was nothing compared to the excitement over the Oobleck. We had to make adjustments to the demonstrations so that the teachers understood well enough to be able to explain the concepts to the students, but in the end everything translated well and the teachers had some fun with it too. Each of the students got an opportunity to play with the Oobleck and observe its properties.
On Friday we took the Mindtrekkers demonstrations to Governement high school. Since the students at the high school were older and a bit more mature than the middle school students, the demonstrations went even more smoothly than they had the day before. There was a lot of smiling and laughing as the students got a chance to get involved with the demonstratinos hands-on. At the end of the day, their main science teacher requested that we send him the lesson plan that we used so that he could continue the Oobleck demonstration. We were glad that they found the lesson so worthwhile.
We brought MTU husky tattoos for the kids, which were a great hit!
The last little project-related task that we completed yesterday was purchasing and delivering a few much-needed cooking vessels to the very grateful headmistress at the Panchayat school.
After working at the college and in the villages for the past 5 weeks, it's a little odd to be done with all of our project work. Our last few days here will be spent packing and saying goodbyes to our contacts at KVCET.
The lessons started at Panchayat on Tuesday with the cardboard boat lesson. Kasthuri helped us to translate the lesson into Tamil so that the children would understand the points that we were trying to stress. We've found throughout our time here that the language barrier is a lot more difficult to overcome than we initially expected. We tried to compensate for this by using visuals in our lessons. We asked the children what a boat/ship is, what they are made of, and what they are used for to start off the lesson. Then we proceeded to explain the physics of a boat and how much weight it can carry (in the most basic sense). After the lesson, it was time to build some cardboard boats. We broke the classes up into groups of 4-6 and provided each group with a medium-sized piece of cardboard and an 8 inch segment of tape and gave them about 10 minutes to build a boat. The testing became the most exciting part of the lesson as everyone huddled around the bucket and counted the stones that we dropped into the boats. Many of the students had tried to copy our example by making a square boat, but some got a little more creative. The strongest boat held 222 stones! We were pretty impressed. It took us two days to do the cardboard boat lesson with each of the classes at Panchayat.
On Friday we took the Mindtrekkers demonstrations to Governement high school. Since the students at the high school were older and a bit more mature than the middle school students, the demonstrations went even more smoothly than they had the day before. There was a lot of smiling and laughing as the students got a chance to get involved with the demonstratinos hands-on. At the end of the day, their main science teacher requested that we send him the lesson plan that we used so that he could continue the Oobleck demonstration. We were glad that they found the lesson so worthwhile.
We brought MTU husky tattoos for the kids, which were a great hit!
After working at the college and in the villages for the past 5 weeks, it's a little odd to be done with all of our project work. Our last few days here will be spent packing and saying goodbyes to our contacts at KVCET.
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