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This project is designed to be an interdisciplinary, flexible, hands-on, inquiry-based educational experience that incorporates learning with community resources.

Interdisciplinary: This project incorporates activities in every discipline, including science, technology, math, social studies, and language arts. The wide variety of activities and roles in the project enable every student to stretch their abilities and knowledge and advance in their best areas.

Flexible: Hockinson students participating in International Public Science Day 2001 were in third grade, but the basic concept of this project can be carried out with students of any age. Any part of the curriculum can be made more or less complex to suit different learning environments and levels. These students were taking workshops at OMSI and working with community partners throughout the school year, and they spent a full month actually building their project. If your students have more or less time, you can deepen or trim the project to suit your needs.

Hands-On: This project asks students to learn about and apply their knowledge to material problems as they create complex models with their own hands, and go on to connect their classroom experience to real issues in their own communities.

Inquiry-Based: There are no right answers to the problems in this project; students learn not by looking for the right answers, but by asking the right questions. Choices made at the beginning of the project teach lessons later on.

Using Community Resources: Resources to help your students enrich this project and bring it alive are right outside your door, from the staff in the local town hall, to members of different local cultural groups, to the senior citizens who were there when your community was younger.

Following are detailed lesson plans for each of the six stages of the project, as well as lesson plans for supporting activities that took place at OMSI, and general resources. Each document is available online and for easy printing as an Adobe Acrobat Document.

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