Natalie001's blog

Hey, Teens. My name is Natalie Harrell and I am going to be one of your supervisors again this summer. I was in the Y.E.S. Program when i was in highschool so some of you may remember me. I am so excited to be back and see all of the new and old faces.

Hi my name is Natalie Harrell and I am one of the STEM Developers for Learning Places. Today we were at Girls Inc. and our theme was optics. We started the class of with a visual color blindness test. The girls were given a sheet of paper with different color circles and numbers blended inside of the circles. The test was for the girls to be able to see and recognize the numbers inside of the circles, which I think they all did, and if the didn't they would be considered, to some extent, color blind. Next we did an optic investigation called Mini Cartoon Thomatropes. This investigation involved the girls creating two separate images (ex: lightning bolt and dark cloud or heart and an arrow) on two cut out circles. The two images were glued back to back and one hole was punched on both ends. Using string they were to tie a large loop, using the holes, on both ends. Holding the ends of both loops the girls were told to wind up their thomatropes, let go and observe. The investigation was to guess and figure out what would happen to the two images when you looked at them while they were spinning. The girls found it exciting to see that the two images blended together to make one image. Overall the girls were interested and had fun today with us.

Hi my name is Natalie Harrell and I am one of the STEM Developers for Learning Places. We have been visiting our community sites for about two weeks now and everything has been going great. Our community sites are Herbert Hoover-Grand, Herbert Hoover-Adams, Girls Inc., Grace Hill-Howard Branch, and Christian Services. The kids we have been working with this summer have been great and excited to see us when we visit. The ages at our site range from 4 to 16(this has been a challenge)and LP has working on ways to expand and change our curriculum to fit all these ages; we are doing this by providing different process skills to the different age groups. But overall this summer is going great and Learning Places is working hard.

Hi my name is Natalie Harrell and I am one of the STEM Developer for Learning Places. So far the summer has been great; we are startng off focused. This week we have been refreshing our memory on everything we learned about inquiry and preparing ourselves for our community sites which we start visiting next week. We have also been learning about the seven processing skills: Observing, Questioning, Hypothesisizing, Predicting, Planning & Investigating, Interpreting, and Communication. We are working on how to combine our inquiry teaching with each of these processing skills. Well I'm very excited about this summmer and I hope for the best.

    Hi my name is Natalie and I am one of the STEM Developers for Learning Places. Well our spring semester is almost over and I think that we have done an excellent job of preparing ourselves for the summer. Overall this semester has been alot of fun and I have learned alot. Inquiry was our big theme for this semester and I think that I have the best understanding about it now. Our goal was to create a curriculum based on inquiry to teach to our community sites in the summer. I am excited to to teach and present all of activities,(our hard work), to the kids, and I know they will enjoy it. Being in Learning Places this semester has meant alot to me, it means alot to me because I feel like I am a part of something that is great, and I got paid for it! I have a great job.

    I have several favorites, and most exciting activities that I love doing, and think the kids will enjoy the most. The create your own flower/plant activities were alot of fun and gave me a chance to use my imagination and be creative, which is an important part of inquiry. Our sand activities were good hands-on activities that I enjoyed, and that the kids would enjoy because it was messy and fun but you still learned things about sand that you never knew. We also worked on optics which I thought was fun too. During this semester we had seversl visitors come and talk to us. One of my favorite visitors was the blind woman who came and tought us how we could change our curriculum to being appropriate for kids with diabilities. She impressed me alot because she helped us so much and I could not believe that she was blind!

Hi my name is Natalie Harrell and I am the STEM Developer for Learning Places. Today was our last day of working on sand acitvities to use with our community sites. The activity was for each of us to pick a container of sand and to search through the sand, using tools we had choosen, for artifacts. Using the artifacts found, we were to investigate and create a story or theory of what we thought happened. The questions to answer were, who died? who was the killer? where did the murder take place? etc. This activity was alot of fun and we all came up with some really crazy stories! We all came to the conclusion that this activity would be one that our community sites would really enjoy; with a few minor changes.

Hi my name is Natalie  and I am one of the STEM Developers for Learning Places. Today everyone in our group designed and created their own flower. After creating the flower we had to explain how the flower reproduces, how does it get it's nutrients, how does it protect itself,etc. The reason for this activity was for us to think of ways to make what we did into an inquiry activity for kids. Today we also did or SCANS which was fun. Our SCANS activities were around the idea of moderate challenges-this is when you start off with a small challenge and gradually increase the challenge. Our challenges were to fit all the members of our team on boards that went from big to really small; it was easy at first but became a major challenge when we had to fit three people on a notebook!