Up, up and away

By MIKE JAMES - The Independent

ASHLAND April 27, 2009 06:28 am

— To the kids it was just another play day.
The exploding pop bottles, the miniature roller coasters, the seeds to plant in warm soil — all were unalloyed fun to pre-schoolers. But their teachers were planting seeds of science in their tiny heads, seeds that will germinate and grow during their elementary school years.
So Diana McClanahan didn’t try to explain the principles of physics that caused a steel ball to leap into the air after it rolled down a ramp she made from plastic tubing. “They’re learning through active play. When they see it they have to try it. They have to experiment,” said McClanahan, a teacher in the Head Start program at Poage Elementary School.
At 3 and 4 years old, the children don’t know they’re learning, she said. But in a few years, say fourth grade, they’ll talk about physics in class and the mental lightbulbs will flick on. “They’ll remember their roller coasters and they’ll connect it.”
For the second year, the Head Start center had a science day on the school grounds. It was a carnival of hands-on activities designed to engage the next generation of scientists, said family involvement coordinator Bernice Henry.
“These children are going to be the keepers of our future so we’d better teach them early how to preserve our earth,” Henry said.
A perennially popular activity was the Mentos-induced eruption of bottles of cola orchestrated by Guy Reynolds. To grownups, it was the displacement of the soft drink by massive amounts of bubbling carbon dioxide.
To the kids, it was a delightfully sticky brown geyser of Coke. “Kids always like seeing it shoot up,” Reynolds said.
Across the way, teaching assistant Laura Justice was helping children mix primary colors, asking them to pick the colors and predict how they’d change when mingled. “It’s an introduction to color and science,” she said.
In a messy introduction to chemistry, kids also got to make slime, a concoction of glue, borax, water and food coloring.
They could plant seeds in a cup and take them home to grow. Three-year-old Zach Kiser took home a sunflower seed. “My little one likes figuring out why things move and how they react,” said his mother, Juanita Kiser. “This starts them early and gets them interested.”
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.

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