Northview — Nina has an ancient artifact inside her desk, where she hopes it will stay safe from being accidentally broken.
Well, it’s not that ancient; she made it herself. But she guards her intricate fossil replica, made from flowers she found on the ground and in a tree on the playground, as if it was.
“At first I was going to do a daisy, or some moss, or a woodchip,” the North Oakview third-grader told a visitor. “I think this turned out pretty good.”
Teacher Jamie Wilcox often offers a Friday STEM project to her third-graders who have completed their work for the week. A recent project, as pitched by student teacher Marlie Fowler, focused on fossils, which they made by pressing their found objects into colored dough, then pouring plaster of Paris over the dough to harden.
“Their first unit is about squirrels, and one big idea (in that unit) is ‘Why do I see so many squirrels, but I don’t see a single stegosaurus?’ This was just a fun extension of when they talked about fossils.”
As Nina explained — to triumphant fist pumps from both Wilcox and Fowler — “A fossil is something from long ago that we have for evidence that the thing or animal was actually alive at one time.”
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