Science Autobiography

Starting in kindergarten, all of my classrooms in elementary school had class pets. In kindergarten, we had a hamster named Oreo and over the school breaks, the class voted on the one person that would get to take Oreo home and take care of him for the long weekend, or long breaks. I was lucky enough to take Oreo home for winter break. Throughout the year, the class talked about where hamsters lived, what they ate, and what we though Oreo's life would be like outside of the classroom. i did not realize until middle school that Oreo was actually a year long science unit. Whether it was in the standard course of study or not, talking about habitats, food chains, and adaptations and then seeing them in action with Oreo was in a way, a year long science experiment. Like my science experience with Oreo, the only times that I can remember studying science in elementary school, were times that we were performing experiments or completing interactive observations (such as Oreo). One year my class grew a garden, one inside where there was no light in a closet and the other outside, in order to learn about photosynthesis and light. At the end of the year we had a party where we were able to eat all of the vegetables and fruits that were grown successfully. There was another year when we had a class soap box derby like event where a guest teacher came in with supplies and helped us build cars that we were allowed to race for a force and motion lesson. Then there were simple experiments like our weather unit where we built the tornado like models using water and two soda bottles, and the time we built paper mache animals to go along with our reports or endangered species.

My father is a chemist and growing up, all of my babysitters where members of his graduate student group. With two of my babysitters, my sisters and I would do experiments, which consisted of adding anything and everything we could find in the kitchen and adding it together to see what might happen. There were also a few times when my sisters and I would get to go to my dad's lab with him. there, my dad would show us what happens when you put something in liquid nitrogen. We froze latex gloves and smashed them on the floor, balloons, bananas, and many other things. For birthday's, we would buy regular balloons and go to his lab and use their helium tanks to blow them up. My little sister loved hearing my dad sound like Donald Duck when he would inhale the helium and his voice would change.

As much fun as the experiments were, they were unfortunately, not very common in the classroom. Many of my science lessons were learning vocabulary, readings from the textbook, copying notes, and completing worksheets for homework about the lessons. Today, the focus of science lessons seems to be very similar. However, today some classrooms have a tool that we never had which can turn these boring note copying lessons into something a little more interesting and attention grabbing. SMART boards give teachers the ability to do interactive note taking lessons, where the students are still taking the notes and learning the vocabulary but they are actively participating in the lesson, and most of the students that I have seen interacting with the SMART boards, love everything about them, regardless of what they are actually doing. Not every classroom can afford SMART boards in each classroom, and similarly not every school can afford the materials necessary for completing experiments. As a result, teachers are left with very little options for making science lessons fun for the students, instead, they are forced to teach those note taking, textbook reading, worksheet lessons which students do not enjoy. Keeping the students engaged and actively participating in the lesson, whether it be with experiments or creating a fun way to present the notes to the students, is key to keeping a students attention and having them learn from the lesson.