By DOUGLAS W. MOTLEY
Senior Writer
Valley of Enchantment Elementary School’s Science Night on Thursday, April 25 turned out to be a cornucopia of hands-on-fun, games and catered food enjoyed by over 100 students, teachers and family members who showed up for the annual event, which kicked off at 4:30 p.m. on the school’s playground.
Students, ranging from kindergarteners to fifth graders, excitedly gathered around tables where their teachers had set up displays featuring hands-on, science-related experiments involving plants, insects, animals, pollinators, magnets, paper helicopters, aluminum foil canoes and boats, sensory items and non-Newtonian fluids.
VOE fifth-grade teacher Stephanie Plemons demonstrated the importance of pollination by handing out small bags of mixed seeds that children could take home to plant and then watch them grow into colorful flowers that would eventually be pollinated by bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. In addition to the seeds, some of which were sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, Plemons gave each child a paper describing the role played by birds, bees and other insects in pollinating plants. Ten-year-old Scott Packers, who is in Miss Burkitt’s fifth-grade class, commented, “This is really good. It’s fun and educational.”
In this law of viscosity experiment, a flat-bottomed boat floated, whereas an aluminum foil canoe tipped over.
In another area of the playground, veteran VOE teacher Mark Warhol demonstrated the principle of viscosity by having children shape aluminum foil into small boats and canoes and then place toy animals in them and then set them into a tub of water to see if their canoe of boat would float. One child was disappointed because his canoe with and without the toy animals in it tipped over each time. Warhol explained that the canoe was too narrow to float. Six-year-old Ayrika Wantz, who is in Miss Endman’s kindergarten class, had mixed luck with her flat-bottomed, aluminum foil boat, which tipped over the first time she placed the toy horse and pig in the boat, but worked better the second time around because the toys were placed in the center of her boat. The scientific principle here (the law of viscosity), explained Mr. Warhol, is that water and other fluids have variable viscosity depending on stress (in this case, the weight of the toys placed in the boat). When asked what she learned from the experiment, Ayrika said, “I learned not to put the horse and the pig in the wrong place.”
Six-year-old Ayrika was thrilled when her flat-bottom boat floated.
Crestline-Lake Gregory Rotary Club President Mary-Justine Lanyon had students drop various objects, such as a small orange and a golf ball, into a bowl of water to see whether they would float.
When they were finished learning about scientific principles, many of the children played on the school’s slide and jungle gym. Before Science Night wrapped up at about 6:30 p.m., some folks enjoyed barbecued sandwiches and nachos from Buddy’s BBQ.
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