Monday, January 25, 2010

Burnin' calories




This week, kids are learning all about energy. Where did it come from, where did it go? Today's lesson: using a homemade calorimeter to calculate the amount of energy in a cashew.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

An Inconvenient Truth and other lessons

Back to school this week after a long vacation, I was worried that the kids would be too tired to grasp the enormity of the climate change issue. No worries, though... as we watched An Inconvenient Truth, everyone's eyeballs were popping out of their heads. Like I suspected, thoughts of the polar bears' extinction created gasps among the teenage girls and the images of Arctic ice cap melting created rightful shock.

This is only week one of preparing the kids for what they'll see when we embark on our annual 18-day field trip on March 1st. Our draft itinerary looks like this: Buffalo Mountain Wind Farm and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in TN, Appalshop and Coal River Mountain Watch in KY and WV, then to Washington, DC to meet important people working on energy issues, down through the middle of North Carolina and ending on Cumberland Island, where we'll take a deep breath next to the ocean.

Who ever heard of such a field trip? The Arthur Morgan School is an incredible place, is it not? www.arthurmorganschool.org