Week 1: Research and Beginning On-Site Work
Welcome back to my blog!
Over spring break and this week, I have had the opportunity to be on-site at the Boys and Girls Club of New Rochelle Remington Clubhouse for a couple of days. I have been meeting with my on-site advisor, Aaron Williams, and developing my environmental curriculum for the afterschool program. Additionally, I have been researching different environmental-themed experiments, as well as community-based projects, to incorporate into the program. Aaron has helped review the list of experiments I have compiled, and he has also provided me feedback on which experiments students would find most interesting.
This week, I have also created a pre-survey for the afterschool environmental program. The goal of this pre-survey was to assess students’ current passion and knowledge of environmental science, as well as find what areas of environmental science students are interested in (such as climate change, energy, ecology, etc.). Furthermore, the pre-survey also gauged students’ confidence in other areas besides environmental science (such as reading, writing, and math). Thus, the pre-survey will help me better shape the afterschool program curriculum in accordance with students’ interests, and will set a benchmark so that I can measure students’ progress after the afterschool program from a post-survey that I will create.
Over the coming week, I plan to finalize my research and list of materials for the afterschool program environmental experiments. Furthermore, the first session of the afterschool program is this Thursday, so I will be preparing a lesson plan and a fun experiment for that. I will update you on how that session goes in my next blog post!
Spring break and this week has been a great start to my onsite time at the Boys and Girls Club of New Rochelle. I was also able to bond with some of the students I will be working with over some basketball! I look forward to reporting on my progress next week!
-Luc
4 Replies to “Week 1: Research and Beginning On-Site Work”
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Wonderful job, Luc! Environmental-themed experiments sound like a great idea! What is the age range of the students you will be working with? How has that factored into your curriculum?
I will be working primarily with middle and elementary school students! A few high schoolers as well. I have tried to create a less advanced curriculum after learning that I will be working more with younger students. Lots of fun experiments and projects!
This all sounds really interesting. How did you choose the questions that you will use in the pre-survey? To what extent do you plan to extend this survey to people who aren’t in the environmental club? How will only surveying people who are already interested in this topic affect the outcome of your survey?
I worked with Mr. Levitsky, my senior project advisor, as well as consulted some of my prior research to create the pre-survey questions. I am keeping the survey to the afterschool program for now, but it might be a good idea to do a general survey for other students as well to gauge the interest and knowledge of students on environmental science. These students have not much prior interest in environmental science, so my survey results should not be that affected.