By Jeanne Sager
LIVINGSTON MANOR– April 29, 2002 — Livingston Manor Central School took another step into the 21st century last week.
The school unveiled this year’s enrichment fair Friday afternoon, an afternoon devoted to Science 21, the new elementary science curriculum.
Annually the school staff is polled to decide what subject they should focus on for the fair. In years past there has been a medieval fair, and an international fair.
This year teachers attended a seminar at BOCES which explained Science 21, a more hands-on, interactive approach to teaching youngsters about the world around them.
“The fact that this was a new program generated a lot of interest,” said Frank Godlewski, elementary principal at Livingston Manor.
“We thought this would be a good way to get into the new curriculum,” added third grade teacher Diane Will.
The students in each classroom were told to come up with a class science project to be displayed at Friday’s fair.
Students in Steve Reynolds’ fifth grade class took their newly-learned microscope knowledge and turned their booth into a game center.
There was pin the part on the microscope, which had fifth-grader Anne Checchia blindfolding other students, spinning them in a circle, then handing over the name of a microscope function tool to velcro somewhere on a picture board of the magnifier. Even those who didn’t come close were rewarded with a piece of candy just for trying.
And other students in her class let onlookers peer into a microscope and guess what it was they were seeing.
This fair was a lot of fun, Checchia said.
“We’ve done a lot of fairs, but we never did science before,” she said. “I just thought this was neat.”
Students in each of the classes – from kindergarten on up – got to wander around the gymnasium and check out what each class had to offer. They played Jurassic mini-golf, read about biomes and watched robots race each other in Battlebot style.
The students carried their own sheets of questions to have answered at each of the stations – ranging from the simple structure of a cell to chemical reactions.
“This was a good way to get the kids involved,” Will explained.