News - NASA Langley Research Center
Scientists Help Students Connect to Earth's System
Scientists Help Students Connect to Earth's System
From Oct. 4 – 24, during the Virginia Science Festival, Earth Science Week and Read Aloud Week, NASA Langley's Science Directorate invited volunteers to participate in the Earth Science K-5 Storybook Read Aloud event. More than 70 volunteers from six directorates at NASA Langley answered the call to read "All About Earth: Our World on Stage" to a K-5 classroom.
Volunteers reached more than 10 different school districts and more than 2,200 students and teachers. They reached as near as NASA Langley's Child Development Center and as far as Southwest Louisiana.
Some volunteers got inventive with the delivery of the story, like Susan Kizer and Xia Cai of the Science Directorate, who made water, air, soil and living things costumes for five of the students to wear and demonstrate the Earth's connections as they read the story, which chronicled a classroom preparing for a play about the Earth's connected system.
Wes Goodman of the Research Directorate, along with his daughter and her boyfriend, visited Armstrong Elementary in Hampton, Va., where they presented a puppet-style "All About Earth" story using narration and stick images of the book's main characters from behind a curtained wall.
From the deck of NASA Langley's Headquarters building, Blain Lege of the Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO) used Langley's notable vacuum spheres as a backdrop as he virtually read to a class in Lafeyette, La.
"I hope I was able to motivate at least one child to get interested in NASA," said Lege, who is from Southwest Louisiana. "By time I was done, everyone wanted to be an astronaut and a star at recycling to help save the Earth."
Because dozens participated, thousands of students were able make personal connections to Earth's system and NASA.
Copies of this book and others about the Earth's system, courtesy of NASA's Elementary GLOBE Program, are available online at: http://www.globe.gov/web/elementary-globe/overview
News origin: NASA Langley Research Center