Kennesaw Mountain was the first opportunity for us to work with students. We prepared activities focused on ground level ozone and ecology, and worked with 20 students from a middle school in Cobb County. Actually the students were recruited by Dr. Hanna's daughter Kelli, an eighth grade student. We arrived around 8:30 A.M. at the Kennesaw Moutain National Park, and set up five teaching stations on picnic tables in a canopied, wooded area in the park. The park, like all National Parks represents the core of an ecological ethic. Interestingly, the content highly suggested by our professors was the study of ground level ozone. In the morning each of the five groups team taught a sequence of constructivst lessons designed to start with the students' concepts of ozone and move increasingly toward the application of the new concepts we had in mind. The idea was to get the students actively involved in learning. We used Ecobadges, a nifty device used to color code ozone, thermometers, sound tube wind measuring devices (known only by TEEMS students), a Rube Goldberg type of machines used to measure ozone (the Ozonometer), and an assortment of colored pens, crayons, M & Ms, string, artsy badges, name tags, and of course, CHARTPAPER.
Following the 2 hours of activities we ate lunch---peanut butter and jelly, apples, potato chips, watermellon, cookies, cakes and candy!!!
In the afternoon Mike led us in a series of environmental education activities drawn from Project Wild. Given the fact that the heat index was about 105, Mike dismissed us about 2:25 in the afternoon.