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By Laura Drinan
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Every year, second grade students at Medfield’s Ralph Wheelock School spend weeks preparing for the science fair.
For days, they rack their brains to conceive an idea that will wow their classmates. Hours upon hours are spent testing hypotheses and making slight adjustments to their experiments to see if the trial will yield a different result.
Then comes the time to write a lab report and transfer the information to a display board. Finally, over the course of two mornings, the second grade students must present their findings to their classmates, teachers, and parents.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for students to begin practicing research and presentation skills,” said Principal Donna Olsen. “It’s really great. We’ve been doing this for many, many years.”
Parents and caregivers were invited on April 12 and 13 to see the students’ work. With the second graders standing behind their display boards and experiments, visitors walked through the cafeteria to see the accomplishments of each student.
“They have so much experience writing informational texts, so this is, like, the culminating activity for all of that,” said second grade teacher Cindy Previdi. “They love it.
“I think next year, we’re incorporating a lot more of this actually in the classroom, and I think it’s going to be more of a theme in terms of what we actually do in second grade science and its standards,” she said. “But this year, they got the choice of whatever they wanted to do, and a lot of them actually chose things that we studied and changed things a bit. So, I thought that was really neat because in the past, we haven’t seen a lot of that.”
As a part of the second grade science curriculum, the children learn about liquids and solids, which inspired many children’s experiments for the science fair. While some of the second graders further experimented with the density and buoyancy of objects, others decided to go a different route.
A popular experiment was to see how carnations soak up water by placing flowers in different cups of food-colored water. Other students tested plant growth, created bath bombs, grew crystals, and experimented with kinetic energy. One student conducted an experiment to see if snails move faster on concrete or dirt, and another constructed a cardboard maze to test her hamster’s abilities.
With the second graders each contributing something unique to the science fair, the annual science celebration was a blast.
