Students Get a Charge Out of Science Festival

Madrona Elementary School parent Donna van Rign lifted a Hula Hoop out of a soap-filled tire ring, encasing a child in a body-sized bubble.

“How does it feel in there?” she called to the child who stood very still.

A few feet away, parent Steve Case was raising a piece of PVC pipe out of a soap-filled trough, creating the “wall,” through which giggling kindergarten students thrust their forearms to shake hands with kids on the other side.

“They handed me six books on this stuff when I became the volunteer,” said Case, a computer salesman and the dad who built the bubble wall. “There is even a Web site on this.”

The mini course in the “bubbleology” laboratory was one of several stations set up and staffed by parents Friday, the last of a three-day, school-wide science festival.

The exhibition is designed to expose students to scientific concepts, with exhibits in electricity, geology, meteorology, herpetology and of course, “bubbleology.”

“That one we just made up,” said coordinator Karen Elliott, a kindergarten teacher at the Thousand Oaks school. “The neat thing about this is that the situation is all flip-flopped. The parents are coordinating it and [the staff is] just the support.”

The geology exhibit, in which students learned how lakes and rivers change with the annual snowmelt, was run by UCLA geology instructor JoAnn Bellen, whose children have graduated from Madrona and now attend junior high.

In the electricity room, parent Kevin Davis, a firefighter whose wife worked on the committee that set up the program, was pressed into service to let children feel the electricity from a Van de Graaff generator.

Sandy McKee and her husband made the body-bubble machine last year and this year worked in the electricity exhibit.

“They aren’t exactly understanding all the concepts,” she said of the kindergarten, first- and second-grade students who went through the exhibits Friday. “But it’s an exposure and they seem to enjoy it.”

With the exception of one, all stations were staffed by volunteers. But the school used funds from a $1,000 grant from Amgen to hire a professional--John Valentine of the Pasadena-based Valentine’s Traveling Nature Class.

Valentine stood in front of the room, a large black snake wrapped around his neck. He held the snake up to his cheek and allowed it to flick its black forked tongue.

“Oooouu, that tickles,” he said as his audience giggled.

Then he allowed each child to briefly hold one of his collection.

When it was 5-year-old Kayla Baker’s turn, she jumped slightly as the cold reptile moved in her hand. “I want him to lick me,” she said.

“He licked me,” said Molly Schoonover, 6, who sat next to Kayla. “His tongue felt dry. But he wasn’t scary.”