By Elissa Milto
In June, CEEO Community Outreach interns worked with two 5th-grade science classes at the West Somerville Neighborhood School, Somerville Public Schools, taught by Lorin Federico, to facilitate an engineering activity developed as part of the Design Talks (DT) and Community Tech Press (CTP) research projects led by Chelsea Andrews, Kristen Wendell, and Greses Pérez.
DT identified and studied the different genres of conversation that support elementary students’ sense-making and decision-making in engineering design experiences.
CTP is a curriculum development project with Somerville Public Schools that takes a civic-oriented approach to middle school engineering learning to explore climate technologies affecting the local community. CTP developed a twenty-lesson curriculum for 6th graders, but the Outreach interns adapted one of the lessons for 5th-grade outreach.
For the 5th-grade classrooms, the interns facilitated a lesson on storm drains. They spent three two-hour class periods with the students, beginning by sharing resources about stormwater infrastructure and then looking at Somerville specifically.
The bulk of the time was spent designing, building, testing, and iterating on a prototype of a storm drain filter system. After testing, each group of students made a presentation to document their work and what they learned throughout the process, both the engineering and the specifics of storm drains in their community.
Jean Pascal Cyusa (pictured), one of the CEEO interns, said, “Helping organize the storm drain activity at the West Somerville Neighborhood School taught me how hands-on learning makes environmental topics feel real to kids. I was surprised by how they were able to come up with ideas that even I hadn’t thought about while preparing the activity. It showed me how creative they can be when they’re given the space to explore.”
Both the 5th-grade students and CEEO interns enjoyed their time together. At the end of the third session, the 5th graders presented their storm drains to fellows and other members of Somerville Public Schools.
