SOUTH OGDEN – “I want to hold a moonstone. I’m holding a moonstone! “exclaimed a student in Craig Pitts’ second grade at H. Guy Child Elementary School.” It looks like the cookies and cream chocolate that I eat. “
Pitts planned a series of cosmic activities Monday through Friday to celebrate Space Week, an annual tradition for its classroom. Unlike students in previous years, this group of second graders had a unique opportunity on Wednesday: They handled and analyzed stones collected from the lunar surface by astronauts from the Apollo program.
“Do you remember the movie you saw with the astronauts on the moon?” said Maggie Huddleston, the science teacher director for the Weber School District, to a group of students who had just moved to Moon Rock Station. She was referring to recordings of the first moon landing in 1969.
“This stone,” she continued, “maybe this was the stone you picked up on this video. This came from the moon. Astronauts got this from the moon and brought it to earth. It is real.”
Acquisition of samples collected on the moon by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas was in preparation for Pitts for several years. It started when he saw an ad in a mailer from the Utah State Office of Education saying that teachers could sign up for training to become certified to receive and handle materials from the Johnson Space Center. So he signed up for the course.
Pitts initially ordered moon rocks watching for his class last year, but schools have been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic shortly before they arrived. He had to refuse the delivery and send the samples back to the sender. “We are happy to have her again this year,” he said.
In order to own the moon rocks, teachers must follow a number of safety protocols. According to Pitts, he had to keep the activity under wraps until the day before the students finished stones. Otherwise he would have had to have armed guards escort the borrowed samples.
Huddleston said she believes Pitts is the only teacher in the district with such certification, but moon rocks are not the only off-earth materials that the second-grade teacher collected for students to study.
A second grade student lifts a meteorite above his head to demonstrate its gravity during Space Week at H. Guy Children’s Elementary School in South Ogden on Wednesday March 31, 2021.
One of the stops the students spent Wednesday included meteorite samples donated to the Weber School District by Utah State University. The students compared a deceptively heavy 12-pound meteorite to a piece of obsidian, which was considerably lighter. They also experimented with the magnetic properties of meteorites, which are made up of iron and lead.
“This one is denser because it is very heavy,” explained one student, lifting the meteorite over his head. Then he picked up the obsidian and said, “This one is really light – carry it – so it’s less dense.”
At another station, students analyzed debris that Pitts had collected from the roof of South Ogden Junior High School to find micrometeorites or stardust.
“What you are going to do is move your plate around and if you see a little piece of dirt rolling around, these are the ones you want to get,” Pitts instructed the students. “They roll like little balls.”
“I see one! I see one! “interjected a second grader.
A second grade student looks at a micrometeorite found in rubble collected from the roof of South Ogden Junior High School during Space Week at H. Guy Children’s Elementary School in South Ogden on Wednesday, March 31, 2021 .
When a student found stardust, they separated it from the rest of the debris and placed it on a clean paper plate, where they viewed it under a telescope and took photos. Then Pitts placed the micrometeorite in a tiny glass that the student could take home.
A group of second grade students use cocoa powder and marbles to replicate asteroids hitting the moon as part of Space Week at H. Guy Children’s Elementary School in South Ogden on Wednesday March 31, 2021.
Students on the other two stations, five in total, used marbles and cocoa powder to replicate an asteroid that hit the lunar surface, and this week wrote poems about the cosmos – Pitts built space into each subject. At each station, students used a package to draw and write observations and questions.
“That’s the way science should be,” said Huddleston. “It is an opportunity to explore, write, and report their observations.”
Although Pitts has been teaching science this way for years, this type of teaching is in line with the latest state science standards introduced in late 2019, Huddleston said. The teachers will be tested for them starting this spring.
The Standards for Science with Engineering Education, or SEEd standards, were passed by the state school board for K-5 students in June 2019. As students continue to learn basic scientific information, these standards emphasize the importance of putting science into practice and teaching.In this way, students learn to think like scientists as they make connections between different subjects.
“You have to be able to find out things and the only way to find out things is to touch them, play with them, look at them, watch them, change them, whatever,” said Huddleston. “You can tell children anything, but until they actually have something to do to find out – that’s how scientists build them.”
A second grade student shows the clothes – each of the planets in the solar system are colored, cut out, and taped onto their clothes – they wore on Wednesday March 31st as part of Space Week at H. Guy Children’s Elementary School in South Ogden . 2021.
Pitts works to implement these principles throughout the school year as students learn about a variety of topics and they love it. Many children were dressed in space-related outfits to recognize the occasion. Some wore Star Wars t-shirts and a second grader was coloring, cutting, and pasting pictures of planets for himself. “This is the best week in the universe,” said one student.
“That has always been my philosophy in teaching, is doing, learning by doing,” said Pitts. “We observe, we write everything we see, we write what we draw, and we ask questions. … That’s what piques the interest, and that’s what brings them to science. “
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