Nurturing Curiosity at Hoosac Valley High School's STEAM Night
Hancock Shaker Village brought an incubator to hatch six chicks.
This year was the school's largest science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics night it has had since its inception with 27 interactive activities, 20 community partners and hundreds of people attending.
"With each year, we get more community partners involved, and more of our teachers are here volunteering their time as well," said Principal Lisa Lesser.
"We're just hoping to bring in families and get them excited about science, math and art all together. And we also have a great science program here as well that happens during the day."
The school was a hub of wonder with an egg-to-chick demonstration from Hancock Shaker Village, lava lamp making from the Berkshire District Attorney and Sheriff's offices, laser mazes from Flying Cloud of Great Barrington, paper-making from the Crane Museum of Papermaking, stargazing in Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts' StarLab, and so much more.
"It's all about exposing kids to different ideas outside of school and also helping them to realize what our community has available to them that they can do with their families at other times," said Sue Maier-Garcia, fifth-grade science teacher who spearheaded the event.
Other community partners included Hoosic River Watershed Association, Berkshire Natural Resource Council, Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Berkshire Museum, General Dynamics, Summer Eats, Berkshire Innovation Center, Optimal Healing, Barrington Stage, Greylock Glenn Reservation, and Specialty Minerals.
The range of activities and topics shows students the interactiveness between art and science and helps students discover what they are interested in, Maier-Garcia said.
"We really worked hard this year to get as much art as we possibly could in. Our art teacher is doing a whole thing where they have static dancers, where they're making tissue-paper people, and then using static electricity to make them dance," she said.
Sixth-grader Tatum Shaw has gone to the event every year since its establishment and, as a hands-on learner, enjoyed the interactive activities, including slime making with fourth-grade science teacher Eric Brown.
"It made me feel good about learning because learning can be fun sometimes," she said.
The event sparks a passion for learning, said Tatum's mom, Heather Shaw, adding how she liked that the event was longer this year so they could see more of the activities.
The range of events allows each child to do things they're really passionate about or learn, she said.
It also brings families into the school and introduces students to curriculum they can expect during their educational career at Hoosac, Maier-Garcia said.
"We also use this event to bring some of our third graders up so they can see the building and start feeling comfortable in the building," Lesser said.
Maier-Garcia highlighted her curriculum on life cycles, adaptations, and ecosystems, which includes an annual partnership with Hancock Shaker Village to hatch chicks.
This year, for the first time, all six chicks successfully hatched and will be returned to the Village, Maier-Garcia said.
"I've just really enjoyed meeting some of the students from Miss Garcia's class who clearly have learned a lot from her about the chick life cycle. They've been telling me when they hatched … and then they've been talking about the equipment that is used," Hancock Shaker Village Education Director Cindy Dickinson said.
"Then the children who aren't yet in fifth grade are learning a lot and looking forward to learning more about chicks when they get older."
Students also got a glimpse of the vastness of the universe in MCLA's StarLab, an inflatable, portable planetarium dome that creates a dark, enclosed space where a projector displays accurate night-sky simulations, including stars, planets, and constellations.
The school rented the lab from the college, and Berkshire Museum curriculum developer Joseph Mastronardi led the demonstration.
"It's stars that they probably have never seen before in a city, or really anywhere in the modern world [because of light pollution.] You see so much stuff, and you just see that there's just so much stuff up there that it kind of wants them to explore more," he said.
The Berkshire Museum also led an interactive activity in which students were "innovating and creating objects to go down our mini zip line."
"I think they've learned quite a bit just by engaging with this about how you can put things together in different ways and get different results out of them, that changing the way that you engage with something can change the outcome," said Sophia Holmes, Berkshire Museum programs manager.
The event also aids in the missions of local organizations.
"A huge part of the Berkshire Museum's mission is inciting curiosity and engagement with the world in general, but also for all of these subjects, like all those covered in STEM and STEAM… and so the Berkshire Museum, being able to be here is just fantastic for us," Holmes said.
A large part of the Berkshire District Attorney's Office community engagement and juvenile diversion is centered around building community and helping support neighborhood development and the STEAM night is a fantastic opportunity to do just that, said Stacy Parsons, the program's director.
Tags: HVHS, STEAM,
