Tomorrow is our elementary school science fair and I wanted to share with you what they do. It is an incredible event!
Our school has 200 students in the TAG program in grades 1-6. Grades 3 and 4 are required to participate in the science fair. This year we have 154 entries for science fair.
They start in December with a kick off assembly. The local hands on museum comes and does a presentation on the scientific method. This year, they did a skit on using the scientific method to use a catapult to launch items into a recycle bin. The students loved it!
After that, they pass out the guidelines for science fair and tell the students to get started on their projects.
February is the due date for project titles.
Judges are assigned to students in March. This year, the school has 21 judges coming from the local metro area. The 21 judges each have 5-6 projects to review. The judges will review each of their projects, then speak to the students about the work they did and assign a grade to each project. The judges then group together by grade and set prizes of GRAND, First and Second. There is no set amount of each prize, judges can have all Grand or all second or any mix of the three categories.
The judges mostly have PhD's or MD's with a few MS degrees thrown in. The judges take time off of work to come in during the school day to work with our students.
Today was the drop off for projects. Each students project was assigned a space in our cafeteria or hallway. (Hallway is for the students who wanted to do a project but did not want to be judged.) The judges are assigned specific projects to judge based on their area of expertise but really the most important goal of the science fair is to make sure that the students understand the scientific method. Sometimes we end up with an engineer judging a biology project or some such stretch but it works!
Tomorrow, the judges will come in at 8 am, be fed a breakfast, will hear about our school, our methods and ideals, will see the projects and then will speak to students individually, will score their projects and will then have a lunch.
On Thursday, there will be an open house in the evening for parents and families to come see all of the science.
It is the best three days of the year at our school!
