Keystone Weekly
volume 3, issue 11        December 3, 2001

This week's Key Points: *Kit Use: Food and Nutrition* and *Web Pick of the Week*
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Kit Use Through a KSN Teacher's Eyes: Food and Nutrition (FOSS)

The last time we discussed Gloria McPherson's kit practice, we covered STC's Experiments with Plants, and this time we'll talk about FOSS's Food and Nutrition.

In Food and Nutrition, students investigate properties of foods. They conduct investigations to determine the amounts of certain nutritional chemicals in foods, and think about relationships between the foods they eat and personal health.

Gloria began using Food and Nutrition a few years ago with her Emotional Support and Alternative Education classes (ages 12 through 21), with good success. She says, "I found this to be an interesting kit for my students. I really enjoyed teaching it, and found it was easy to supplement it with a lot of different information and activities."

Due to some of her students' special needs, Gloria and her students cannot do all of the activities included in the kit, but there is still a nice selection they can do to help convey key science topics. In particular, Gloria shares that her students are most interested in the activity that focused on feeding yeast and then measuring the volume of gas that the yeast produced. She says, "They really got into the whole concept of seeing what happened when you changed the amount of `food' they gave the yeast."

To extend the kit's theme, Gloria uses parts of a food and nutrition curriculum, produced by Penn State University. These activities tie in well with the kit, and offer fun activities such as baking chocolate cupcakes using the package recipe and two different substitutes for the fat, to compare taste and nutritional value. Gloria discusses the appeal of this activity: "This offered a chance to look at the food pyramid with real food. And most everyone likes chocolate cake." There are also a few surprises for the student bakers: "Part of the fun for the students who did the baking was when they got to tell the tasters that the `secret ingredient' in the one batch of cupcakes was prune juice!" Gloria is also able to introduce the unit by sharing some MREs (meals ready to eat, used by the military), "which got the kids hooked on the whole idea of food and nutrition from the beginning."

Regarding the kit materials, Gloria says, "I like the format of the teacher's manual and the student worksheets. I felt the information was presented clearly, and the teacher information was presented in a way that made it easy to teach." The relevance of the topics covered and the high interest level of the activities for students makes Gloria gladly recommend Food and Nutrition to other teachers.

Gloria is glad to have the kits, as they comprise the bulk of the science program that she is able to offer. In fact, she says, "I really like the kit format and the fact that it provides the necessary materials, because we have very little in the way of science equipment or resources," adding, "Without the kits, our science materials and resources would be limited."

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Web Pick of the Week
TerraServer
http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/default.asp

Susie Brobston from the William Penn School District recommends Microsoft's TerraServer, which is one of the world's largest online databases, providing free public access to a vast data store of maps and aerial photographs of the United States.

It's amazing to see the level of precision that can be captured from space. You'll be able to find The Franklin Institute when you enter in the street address (which is 222 North 20th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103). Susie says, "You can enter a town, city, or famous site and get an aerial photo or a map. Then you zoom in for a closer look. Great for map skills, scale, and geography. Enjoy!"

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9819641.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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