Published Wednesday, March 26, 2003
By Erin Palko
Herald Staff Writer
Reynolds students recently got a taste of what it's like to blast off into outer space.
At the beginning of the month, the sixth-grade classes took a trip to the Challenger Learning Center at Wheeling Jesuit College in Wheeling, W.Va. The center, founded by the families of the seven astronauts who died in the 1986 Challenger disaster, is one of 46 of its kind in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Sixth-grade classes at Reynolds have been traveling to the Wheeling center annually since it opened in 1994. Sixth-grade science teacher Jane Turcic heard about the center at a teachers conference and she has been accompanying the students ever since. In previous years she went with fellow teacher Judy Blythe, but this year she was joined by Kelly Fuchs, another science teacher, and Thiel College student teacher Kate Slatcoff.
"At the Challenger Center they do everything they can to make it seem like the children are astronauts on a space mission," Mrs. Turcic said.
After a short briefing, the students are assigned to either the space lab simulator or mission control. Halfway through the two-hour mission they switch, so everyone gets to experience both the simulator and mission control.
Then they are divided into eight teams: medical, life support, isolation, remote, probe, navigation, communication and data.
"Each team has a goal, and the whole class works together," Mrs. Turcic said.
Every year the class has a different mission. This year's mission was "Voyage to Mars." Past missions have included "Return to the Moon" and "Rendezvous with a Comet."
The trip is actually a culmination of an eight-week cross-curriculum study on space, during which the students not only apply their science and math skills but also exercise their language and artistic talents by drawing posters and writing essays on the subject.
"What I think is important is the training that goes on beforehand," Mrs. Turcic said. "Everything we do up to this point is getting ready."
They start by learning about the history of space flight and the moon missions of the 1960s. They also learn how NASA functions.
Activities during training have included launching model rockets, building scale models of the solar system, chemical experiments, learning the geology of other planets and "walking the orbits" of the planets in the solar system on the science lab floor.
One art project included illustrating a "space locker," which helped the students decide what necessities they would take with them on a real space mission. The items they drew on the posters, which were supposed to be the actual size of real space lockers, ranged from basic toiletries to video game systems to Bibles and pictures of their families. The activity was part of a critical-thinking exercise, Mrs. Turcic said.
This year's preparation for the Challenger Center trip did not go as smoothly as it did in previous years. The students were about halfway through the preparation program when the space shuttle Columbia exploded Feb. 1. Coincidentally, the students were studying the space shuttle the week before the tragedy.
Mrs. Turcic said that although the disaster was hard to deal with, ignoring it would have been a mistake.
"We were doing the space shuttle the week before, so they really understood what happened," Mrs. Turcic said. "That was probably the hardest part of our training this year ... that was hard, to have that happen in the middle of training."
The Columbia disaster found its way into the mission patch the students designed for this year's mission. The patch pays tribute to both the Challenger and the Columbia missions, with a picture of a space shuttle and a row of stars.
This year's patch and mission patches from previous years adorn the walls of the science lab at Reynolds Elementary School.
Mrs. Turcic said the students worked very hard, but they also had fun.
"They were so enthusiastic and so eager. The kids did very well," she said. "They were very well prepared."