Wodatch is executive director of D.C.’s Two Rivers Public Charter School, where a recent project by second-grade students is helping to shape a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum exhibit. Wait, what?
We’re an “expeditionary learning school,” where students do long-term, in-depth investigations into particular topics. It’s basically taking the concepts of Outward Bound — the program that brings kids into the forest and teaches them about sustainability — into the classroom. Expeditions are about learning by doing, and our students do two expeditions each year. One is on science, one is on social science. If you ask most adults what they remember about school, they almost always name projects.
How did you get involved with Smithsonian?
In the second grade we teach about the forces of flight. Our second-grade teachers started a partnership with the coordinators of the “How Things Fly” exhibit. There are a lot of projects kids can do and examples about flight, but the explanations are high-level and geared toward older kids. We wanted to change the exhibit so that it was more accessible to younger kids, so that became the problem for our kids to solve on their expedition. One day I walked through the halls and the kids were dropping parachutes from the second floor onto the first floor and timing them to figure out how to make them go more slowly.
So what did the kids come up with?
A couple of things! The exhibit coordinators do a story time for younger children, so our students collaborated on two stories for them to tell. They also created a song that the coordinators could sing, called “The Four Forces Shuffle.” The second-graders also made a coloring book, and a project where kids could make paper airplanes and alter them to hit a target. We really had them playing the role of scientist, but they were also using their role as kids.
— Lisa Gartner
