On March 19, parents filed outside of Clanton Intermediate School in a line waiting to check in. One mom of a sixth grader turned to another mom, saying her kid got himself up at 6 a.m., because he was so excited about today. The other mom responded, saying her kid did the same thing. The two moms were shocked by the enthusiasm their kids had for the day.
“It’s been really good for the kids to see it work and come to fruition,” Clanton Intermediate School science teacher Kimmy Ellis said. “There’s been lots of nerves leading up to today, and for what they were going to do, but over the last couple of days, you could just see the excitement starting to build.”
On March 19, parents, students and teachers filed into the lunchroom to experience the first annual Clanton Intermediate School sixth-grade Science Expo. With the support of administration, parents and teachers, students put together boards displaying a month-and-a-half-long project with an experiment and information.
“We’re big on authentic learning, and so this was definitely a challenge for our kids because they have never done this type of project to this extreme,” said Ellis. “When we were putting our heads together about it, this was one way to take them to the next level, and to hopefully develop a love for science.”
CIS Science teachers, Lakelyn Botts and Ellis, put together the Science Expo to help bring kids out of the classroom where they have been learning the scientific method and into practical application, where they could learn by applying what they have learned.
“This is the first one we have ever done; we wanted to bring the community and show our community that our kids are not just going to school just to be here; they are learning, and we wanted to show the community what they could do,” said Botts.
One of the other reasons they wanted to do this expo was so they could teach their students to do hard things.
“This is a daunting task; we really pushed our kids to step out of their comfort zone because it is so easy in education to be like ‘I don’t know something,’ and that’s that,” said Botts. “And this kind of shows them that they can do that, they can do hard things, they’ve learned perseverance.”
Students were assigned the overall project on Jan. 7, and Botts and Ellis were thinking they would make the project earth and space focused. However, they decided to try letting the students choose their own experiment to see if it would make the dive deeper into their projects.
“They were able to choose what they’re doing, and that kept them invested. They wanted to investigate, find the evidence and go to that next level,” said Ellis. “We wanted to push them to that next level of thinking and take that abstract and learn how to pull it all together.”