Westchester Exceptional Children's School

Upstairs Science News

September, 2009
Sylvia Kenny

This year we will be learning about science and social studies, as the two departments complement each other quite nicely. We are starting off the year learning about River & Streams, which is a carry over from the summer program. Students are learning what makes a river a river, not a lake, pond or wetland as the science portion of class. Then, since it was relative, we were also able to squeeze in leaning about the Hudson River’s discovery 400 years ago, - what explorers were and why Europeans wanted, so desperately, to find a new trade route to the Orient as our social studies portion.

As the year progresses we will continue to work on "themes" so as to combine the two departments. Some students had the opportunity to make leaning about the Hudson River, navigation, simple machines, and Hudson aquatic life real. They sailed on the famous Clearwater Hudson Sailing Sloop! It was an awesome educational adventure which got students excited and made their up coming river project more relevant.

The project requires students to chose a river - anywhere in the world and do a small report on it. Here they are obtaining most of their information from a computer printed sheets, then gleaning out facts and statistics about their river. They need to know what continent their river is found on, what countries or states do they touch as well as what are the typical animals that live or frequent the river, etc. Presentations are optional for sharing their information to the class or the school. They have the choice of creating a diorama of a portion of their river, a poster highlighting important facts or animals, or draw an accurate map showing geographic locations. Completed projects should be coming home in the next couple of weeks.