Award Category: Most Innovative New Activity or Program
Contact Person:
Name: Marsha Phillips
Address: 1611 S. Hampton Dr.
Aurora, IL 60506
Phone: 630-264-6483
E-mail: Mphil12522@aol.com
Description of Activity/Program:
High School Students Service Hours Project
One of the Chicago Section members, a teacher, has developed a program through which high school students can earn service learning hours by helping pre-Kindergarten children with some simple chemistry experiments. The Chicago Public Schools requires forty hours of service learning from each high school student in order to graduate.
Five students from Farragut Career Academy, an inner city school in Chicago, worked with a group of forty three and four year old children in the pre-Kindergarten program at the high school this fall. These students learned how to make "fun" chemicals such as SLIME, GAAK and GLOOP from household chemicals, such as borax, glue, and food coloring whenever possible. They then prepared the materials for the children to use. Many of the materials used were donated to the program or recycled. This was done under the supervision of Ms Marsha Phillips, a Chicago Section member.
The high school students then went to the pre-K program at scheduled times and showed the children how to make these chemicals themselves. Safety precautions were observed; all of the students and children wore safety glasses. With help from the students, the little ones then read the directions, measured out the chemicals and mixed them. They thoroughly enjoyed this activity and packed up their treasures in Ziploc bags to take home. The children were very excited about the chemistry they learned and were eager to do more experiments. The pre-K teacher is very enthusiastic about this activity and it will continue throughout the school year.
The high school students have also enjoyed working on this project with the children. Some of them had already earned eight hours of service learning credit before the end of 2002. The high school counselors have also endorsed this program.
The Section is very proud of this program and hopes to expand it in the future.
Please provide a 2-3 sentence abstract that describes your activity.
A Section member has developed and supervised a service learning project for inner city high school students. Five high school students learned how to prepare some "fun" chemicals such as SLIME and GLOOP and then taught a group of forty 3 and 4 year old children in the pre-Kindergarten program how to make them. The high school students earned service learning hours and the children learned about measurement and chemistry in an enjoyable and exciting way.
