Stars and STEM Stories
Jesse Stuart Elementary School, Madisonville, KY, United States
From gardening to quilting, students at Jesse Stuart Elementary in Madisonville, KY, are finding creative ways to demonstrate the lessons they learn in GLOBE. Through weekly weather forecasts, the students are also helping others in their school to better understand Earth's environment.
To show how weather patterns across the country change, students in Ms. Pat Bush's 5th grade class designed and made a GLOBE quilt, with velcro pieces representing different temperatures and clouds. As the weather changes across America, the students move the velcro pieces accordingly.
Ms. Bush has been recognized as one of two Kentucky finalists for the National Science Foundation's Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, in part for developing a year-long teaching module titled Life's Garden of Learning. The students tend a formal garden, which includes a small cotton crop, herb beds, butterfly-attracting flowers and native Kentucky plants. "I felt I achieved that honor based on my GLOBE projects," Ms. Bush says.
Jesse Stuart Elementary has also been recognized as a Kentucky Environmental Resource School. Students work with the state's Environmental Director to disseminate environmental education within the community.
"GLOBE is tied in with a lot of 5th grade subjects and skills," Ms. Bush says, citing her use of GLOBE to help teach the metric system and decimals as examples. "We've learned so much about culture and places all over the world."
21 December 1998