LAVALLETTE — Kindergarten through eighth-grade students at Lavallette Elementary School put their reading, writing and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math) skills on display this week for the school’s annual project gallery last week.
English language arts (ELA) teacher Sophie Savage, who organizes the school-wide project, took The Ocean Star on a tour of the students’ projects on Wednesday. She explained the concept of the multi-discipline, multi-grade-level project as well as the book that is the subject of this year’s “One Book, One School” project. The book is “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race” by Margot Lee Shetterly.
“This book presents the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African-American female mathematicians who were known as ‘human computers’ at the time,” she said, adding that they “enabled some of the United States’ most important achievements in space exploration during the Space Race.”
“Despite achievements such as enabling the first man on the moon, these women and many others like them were unknown to the public until their story was shared,” Savage said. “Those who cheered on these astronauts going to the moon really didn’t know who these women were due to gender and racial inequalities occurring at the time.”
One of the highlights of the gallery walkthrough was the display of homemade rockets. Nearly 100 different baking soda-and-vinegar rocket designs were set up on a long table in the main hallway, with a screen behind the projects showing a compilation of videos of students, parents and teachers doing their experiments at home.
“My favorite project has to be the rocket,” said Kirra Leonard, a fifth-grader. She told The Ocean Star about the trial-and-error process involved in science experiments. “I don’t even know how many times I tried it, and it always would fail…It’s OK to make mistakes, because I know you can always reflect on them to try and make a better design; I messed up, but then I’d switch things around until it worked.”
Two separate field trips were also offered to some of the students to learn about space exploration: a trip to the Buehler Challenger & Science Center in Paramus for seventh- and eighth-graders and a trip to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City for third- through sixth-graders. Seventh-grader Mackenzie McCutcheon told The Ocean Star about her experience at “mission control” at the Buehler Center.
“It was really cool,” Mackenzie said. “I liked how we got to switch halfway through the trip; each group got to launch off in a special room, which I thought was pretty cool because it felt realistic. They made you strap your safety belt and work the computers; me and my friend Giselle had to find and take out an asteroid that was going to hit Mars.”
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